posted on 9/15/2011 3:50:45 PM
Contract manufacturer Inpac Pharma has swapped out manual quality tracking processes for Epicor Software’s ERP suite, which, with its quality management module, will simplify product traceability and improve accuracy of data.
Understanding that quality management must be embedded within each manufacturing process, Inpac Pharma, a Swedish contract manufacturer for the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, has announced that it will implement Epicor Software’s enterprise resource planning product to improve the traceability of materials and products as they move through production, packaging, and distribution.
Epicor, which merged with Activant Solutions in May when both companies were acquired by private equity firm Apax Partners, built its ERP software on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the Microsoft .NET framework. According to the company, SOA technology can define workflows as business logic, which is exposed as Web services to provide a way to customize business rules without a lot of complicated coding.
Included in the ERP suite is a module that is said to provide quality assurance as part of the business system workflow. According to Epicor, this module was a key reason why Inpac Pharma chose Epicor ERP software.
To date, Inpac Pharma has been documenting its production and packaging quality processes manually as well as through a separate quality system, resulting in a lot of time-consuming integration work. With the Epicor ERP software, the quality management will be part of a single system.
"The entire quality assurance and quality control processes will now be included in the actual workflow rather than being kept as a separate function that is processed separately,” said Peter Thulin, managing director for Inpac Pharma, in a statement.
Having quality management included in the workflows and recorded in the same database, Thulin said, will result in time savings, improved accuracy, and simplified traceability.