TORONTO—The OTC Group, a high-performance packaging and data company, based in London, ON, has partnered with Xerox to prevent the theft and counterfeiting of pharmaceutical packaging with the development of the Xerox Automated Packaging Solution (XAPS).

According to Xerox, package theft and counterfeiting in the pharmaceutical industry can cost an estimated $75 billion to $200 billion globally each year, not to mention the fact that counterfeit medications puts human lives at risk.

XAPS includes a workflow process and packaging approach to prevent these issues, and joins printing, coating, stacking and die cutting, all inline, allowing the OTC Group to produce folded cartons with advanced anti-counterfeiting measures that are efficient and affordable.
The U.S. passed the Drug Quality and Security Act in 2013 to address counterfeiting and theft, but some companies have yet to comply.

“While many in the pharmaceutical industry struggle with the ability to conform to serialization and track-and-trace accountability, we’ve engineered a process that works,” Adam Egan, OTC Group’s VP of high-performance packaging said.

According to OTC, when one client required an 800,000 printed carton production run, XAPS eliminated millions of dollars of risk exposure by providing traceability at every level, with the ability to account for every package printed—including waste—and providing that data to the client in electronic format.

Currently companies use an inkjet printing process to apply identifiers at the last stage of packaging, however this method leaves opportunities for fraud, especially when an outside vendor provides package printing and assembly.