Lüneburg, Germany, 17 October 2019 – OPEN-SCS and Werum IT Solutions successfully staged the “OPEN-SCS plug fest” at Werum’s headquarters in Lüneburg, Germany. The OPEN-SCS working group is partnered with the OPC Foundation to develop an open source standard covering the complete business transaction for the data exchange in pharma packaging serialization.
During the plug fest the interfaces between the ISA levels 2-3 and 3-4 and the different vendors have been tested. Besides Werum (manufacturing IT including serialization solutions) the companies ACG (end-to-end pharmaceutical solutions), ADVANCO (packaging/distribution serialization and track and trace level 3 and 4), and WIPOTEC (serialization provider of level 2 systems) took part in the interoperability tests. Complex data containing, for instance, serialization mass data, were exchanged and the compliance with the OPC UA standard checked.
“The results are very satisfactory,” says Costantino Pipero, leading the event on behalf the OPC Foundation. “We fully achieved our goals, testing the interfaces, interoperability, and compliance adherence. The specification is viable, that means no changes are needed. For OPEN SCS this is the basis to now start and speed up implementation.”
In recognition of its efforts to develop an open communication standard, the OPEN-SCS working group was honored with the Pharma 4.0 Award by the Pharma MES / Pharma TRACKTS! conference. The award will further boost OPEN-SCS to realize its vision: to reduce the total cost of ownership for packaging serialization in the pharma and biotech industry.
