It’s been two months since Cardinal Health has gone live in February with Investigator, LSPediA’s preeminent exceptions management solution for EPCIS onboarding of its suppliers. For Workshop 5, the Big Three wholesaler gave its audience an update about how impressive Investigator has performed in the live environment, how the software has revolutionized Cardinal’s internal exceptions process, and how it is going to continue to be used going forward.
In a timeline, Jeff Falardeau, Manager, Applications Development at Cardinal Health Track and Trace Solutions reiterated the importance of the company’s goals for 2022, including completing EPCIS onboarding with manufacturer supplier. For 2023, with Investigator implemented, Cardinal Health’s objectives are to stabilize the systems while refining exception processing, populate customer DSCSA portals with serialized data, and pivot to outbound process for dispensers.
The importance of supplier onboarding with good EPCIS data couldn’t be stressed enough, as Falardeau illustrated that shipment arrived with late, failed, and incorrect EPCIS data files will not be acceptable under the DSCSA requirement. These shipments will be dispositioned to quarantined, returned, or destroyed, along with other undesirable consequences, costing time and money. The goals of exceptions automation using Investigator are to provide supplier error feedback in the shortest amount of time possible and to create opportunity to remediate data issues before receiving is impacted.
“We have a lot of quality data and great cooperation from our manufacturers who are working with their IT teams for remediation,” said Falardeau. “We are seeing a lot of consistently good files coming in. The great thing with Investigator is that it quickly brought issues to the surface. Circumstances can and will come up, and we understand that. Stabilization by early 2023 is going to be key to make us successful.”
David Mikesell, Software Engineer, Track and Trace Solutions at Cardinal Health described the error resolution process before and after Investigator. It was almost a matter of night and day. Before Investigator, EPCIS exception management was not timely, consistent, and especially not scalable. Investigator on the other hand, has provided automated exceptions workflow. Investigator sends error emails directly and functions as a platform for error resolution.
“Investigator creates a much more streamlined, efficient and scalable process for all of us,” said Mikesell, while showing before and after process charts. “Errors and warnings are reported immediately by automation and are indicated in the email subject line with consistency. A secured link is given, and errors can be followed up and remediated as soon as possible.”
From there, LSPediA Product Engineer Ilir Invezaj illustrated how effectively Investigator works with failure notifications – the emails that are sent, what document information and issues are shown when the secure link is clicked, and how easily a file can be reprocessed.
Cardinal Health has continued to prove in all its workshops that Investigator is the very best and most comprehensive EPCIS solution for all things DSCSA compliant and serialization going forward.
Falardeau concluded, “Utilizing LSPediA’s Investigator, I feel very good about its ability to uphold the highest standards of GS1 Conformance testing. We are confident that working with us and with Investigator, our suppliers are getting a thorough edit of their files in tests and production.”
The next Cardinal Health Workshop 6 will be Wednesday, May 18. Sign up for it here. To read recaps of previous Cardinal Health Workshops, click here.
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