Cencora

As one of the “big three” pharmaceutical wholesale distributors, Cencora¹ connects manufacturers, providers, and patients to provide them with the therapies they need, where and when they need them. These partnerships bring an enormous amount of data that must be managed; and Cencora ensures data quality is maintained. When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration enacted the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) to improve interoperability between trading partners, and traceability at the lowest saleable-unit level, many in the industry focused solely on compliance. But for Cencora, it became an opportunity to enhance master data management—especially for adding new products—that would “level up” industry standards, resulting from manual processes being used.

Cencora launched a pilot to demonstrate that GS1’s Global Data Synchronization Network™ (GDSN®) could be used to manage product data for existing and new products in the supply chain that are governed by DSCSA. Working with a drug manufacturer and a data pool, the company was able to prove the GDSN concept improves both data quality and accuracy while reducing risk of human error and increasing productivity.

Improved Data Quality: Through the use of the GDSN information exchange, trading partners can receive accurate updates to products and their attributes in real time.

Improved Productivity: Resources are focused on core functions versus manually communicating product information or dealing with errors due to inaccurate data.

Future-Proofing: By utilizing the GDSN with its manifest benefits, companies can be well-positioned for the next stage of supply chain technology and regulation.