In this customer interview, we explore the critical role labeling plays at GSK, a global healthcare and pharmaceutical leader.
We talk with Rob Worland, GSK’s Product Owner – Warehouse, Distribution & Labeling, about the company’s approach to labeling and why it is core to business success. Rob shares his predictions for the future of labeling based on industry trends, technology shifts and company objectives, and reflects on the value the organization has been able to unlock with the support of Loftware’s labeling solution, Loftware Spectrum.
Rob has been Tech Product Owner for Factory Operations and Labeling since 2018, including SAP WM, outsourced warehousing, temperature monitoring, and labeling solutions.
Rob has seen his role at GSK evolve over time as the business has embraced centralization. He explains what that means for him and how some of those changes have come about, “My original role was focused on managing the deployment of Warehouse Management within SAP ECC 6.0 across all our pharmaceutical and healthcare sites globally. Our legacy labeling system, which we’d had for 20 years, wasn’t standardized across our sites and we were acutely aware of the need to move to a centralized solution. Rolling this out globally and enabling us to all operate from one system has become about 50% of my role, as the company focuses on a strategic move towards a centralized IT model.”
We have seen SAP label print times reduce by 98%. We’ve also achieved a 75% reduction in label design time and a 66% reduction in label design costs.
Rob Worland
GSK’s Product Owner
So, what were the key drivers that led to GSK focusing on a standardized, global solution? Rob explains, “Part of our global strategy for adopting a centralized model was driven by the large amount of complexity to labeling introduced over recent years, and increased costs with running a system on each warehouse site.”
Furthermore, the role of labeling at GSK has changed to become more strategic over the last five to ten years, and Rob believes there were several factors at play, ”SAP has been core to our more strategic focus on labeling, and reducing label formats and templates was something we wanted to drive towards to streamline our process and support lower operating costs.”
“Previously, there were instances where inventory figures were requested on a particular product line, but it would take weeks to collate from every system. By that point, the information was no longer relevant or as valuable.”
GSK knew that a centralized data approach would help to deliver greater, real-time insight, as well as delivering streamlined labeling processes without the complexity and manual input required to deal with different systems at locations across the globe.
Labeling challenges for GSK and the pharmaceutical industry are mirrored by many companies. Rob explains, “Many challenges we face are linked to business growth at GSK: supply and distribution chains become increasingly complex with regulatory changes happening rapidly across the globe. For example, we have to track our products in large supply chains through GPS and serialization. We also have to deal with frequent business changes, including mergers and acquisitions, which put pressure on businesses in our industry to ensure company branding is adopted quickly to avoid legacy logos remaining on packaging.”
Standardization, centralization and integration are key to meeting many of the common challenges we face.
Rob Worland
GSK’s Product Owner
