By November 2019, wholesale distributors will be required to verify the serialised product identifiers for any saleable products that have been returned to them before they can be restocked and resold. With this new saleable returns verification requirement, the challenges of master data exchange for manufacturers will come to the fore.
To manage the scope, scale, and challenges of the saleable returns requirement, wholesalers and manufacturers must re-evaluate their current methods of exchanging product master data information.
The Scale of the Challenge
The national organisation representing primary wholesale distributors in the US, the Healthcare Distribution Alliance (HDA), executed analysis of saleable returns. This showed that approximately 60 million units of drug product are returned annually, with the majority of saleable returns caused by overstocking (1).
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