A range of labelling solutions promises to stem the tide of drug counterfeiting that endangers the health of patients and robs pharmaceutical companies of revenue.
Worldwide pharmaceutical production continues to grow, as the industry works to deliver a rapidly expanding range of products to an ever broadening market. However, in tandem with these developments has come a security challenge in the form of drug counterfeiting that presents serious dangers. The greatest threat is to patients who, if they are lucky, end up with poor imitations of the real drug they need. Counterfeiting also robs the pharmaceutical industry of hundreds of millions of dollars of returns on their R&D investment.
Labelling expertise
These issues were highlighted at CCL Label’s European Label Security Conference this September, in Copenhagen. Among the 60 delegates were the company’s leading European customers. CCL Label values these annual get-togethers, which it also holds in North and South America and in its fast-growing Asian market, because they provide it with a unique opportunity to listen to customer feedback and find out what it can do better.
What CCL Label already does well is produce labelling solutions, including RFID, (with preferred partner Avery Dennison); overt, covert and forensic inks (JDSU and InkSure); secure code control and tracking (Verify Brand); visual indication of expiration (Timestrip); and 2D and 3D matrix algorithm bar codes, UV codes, micro-printed texts, watermarks and holograms.
CCL Label is particularly proud to have pioneered effective braille labelling (BrailleMarker, now in its second generation), which also embraces extended content labels (ECLs), well in advance of EU regulatory requirements.
Fast and flexible
Innovative and security-focused products are, however, only one part of the challenge. CCL Label customers demand, sometimes at very short notice, fast, flexible and precisely timed responses to their labelling requirements. Being in a position to fulfil all orders, in terms of both capacity and plant location, requires a lot more than just the company’s ISO 9001 quality and ISO 14001 environmental certifications, and its rigid adherence to good manufacturing practice (GMP).
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 CCL Label has 20 manufacturing sites in ten countries worldwide, dedicated to pharmaceutical label production. Of these, eight are located in five European countries. Each site is close to the company’s customers, who may themselves be international producers with diverse production units.
Because CCL Label understands that it must respond flexibly to orders, each plant is highly autonomous. The company is therefore a flat rather than a top-down organisation. By design, each plant always maintains 10% spare capacity over and above its rising order book. This means each facility is always able to fulfil rush orders, and if more capacity is required for a particular job, it can call upon the spare capacity of sister sites elsewhere in the world.
This is possible because of CCL Label’s web-based PrePress Net secure closed-circuit facility for its customers, which permits the electronic input of original data, simplifies proof-reading and facilitates the distribution of a job as and when necessary. From first data to delivery, an order, however large, takes no more than ten days.
CCL Label is an independent international division of its Canadian parent, CCL Label Industries. It has been in the highly competitive labelling business for 40 years, but present in Europe for only the last five. The company has grown its worldwide footprint both generically and through acquisitions in North, Central and South America, West and East Europe, and Asia. CCL Label’s success has stemmed from its decentralised local customer response capability. And that is how things will stay.
Company profile
CCL Label Healthcare is a leading supplier of label solutions to the European pharmaceutical industry as well as a wide range of other industrial applications and consumer goods.
For further information, visit www.ccllabel.eu
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