When shipping drugs or materials that will be used as part of clinical trials, it is important to ensure that they will not expire soon, thus ensuring patient safety, reducing waste, and increasing trust in product quality for all actors in the clinical supply chain.
Clinical Supplies Management module can be used to warn users when packing material that is near to reaching its shelf advice, best before or expiration dates, thus ensuring the product quality of each shipment. To enable such controls, define the following parameters in the Packing tab of the Warehouse management parameters form (Warehouse management > Setup > Warehouse management parameters):
Number of days before Expiration date: if enabled, the system displays a warning message upon packing a batch or sub-batch that will reach the expiration date within the defined number of days.
Number of days before Shelf advice date: if enabled, the system displays a warning message upon packing a batch or sub-batch that will reach the shelf advice date within the defined number of days.
Number of days before Best before date: if enabled, the system displays a warning message upon packing a batch or sub-batch that will reach the best before date within the defined number of days.
In the Pack form (Warehouse management > Packing and containerization > Pack), after scanning the license plate or shipment, the system checks the batch or sub-batch dates against the parameters with the system date and displays a warning to alert users that a material picked for a shipment is going to cross its Expiration date, Shelf advice date or Best before date in the near future.
Note
The pack functionality is built in the Warehouse management module; therefore, the pack control feature is applicable only to items and warehouses that use warehouse management processes.
Example
Sub batch “BN001-001” is included in the pack operation of license plate “LP001”;
Today is “1/1/2023”;
Number of days before Expiration date is set to “10”;
Expiration date of sub batch “BN001-001” is set to “5/1/2023”.
When scanning license plate “LP001”, the system displays a warning message to inform the user that sub batch “BN001-001” is going to cross the shelf advice date in a number of days which is less than the value defined in the Number of days before Expiration date field. The warning message does not block the packing process.
Additionally, in the Pack form, Pack Item > Identifier, users can scan the sub-batch directly so that the system automatically packs it into the container That means, the sub-batch line disappears from the Open lines tab and it’s marked as Complete in the All lines tab.