Teleflex is a multinational provider of specialist medical devices, with an established portfolio of products ranging from urology and cardiac care through to anaesthesia and respiratory care. The company’s sustained success has led to significant growth through acquisitions of other companies and brands in the medical device space, bringing new products and facilities under the Teleflex remit.
Seeking to streamline operations, centralise asset management and eliminate the risk of product recalls, the company has pursued a strategic, long-term project to establish a Global Labeling System, with the Kallik Veraciti™ labeling and artwork management solution at its heart.
Future-proofing operations on a global scale
Teleflex, a highly successful medical devices company headquartered in the U.S, has a significant global footprint both in terms of its physical locations and its targeted sales markets, with design and manufacturing facilities spread across the Americas, Europe and Asia.
Its strong performance in the global medical device market has been further boosted by a series of high-profile mergers and acquisitions. These acquisitions, such as the leading Arrow brand of vascular access products, add greatly to the operational complexity of the company’s already global highly regulated operations that must be handled by Teleflex management on a day-to-day basis.
High on the list of priorities is the labeling, artwork and associated assets that must be accurately tailored to every target market and language. The risk of introducing asset inconsistencies and siloed data within teams and Business Units scattered worldwide brings a low-lying threat of costly product recalls.
Acquisitions have also required the integration of existing standalone supply chains, IT systems and business processes into Teleflex. With a growing number of disparate legacy systems straddling multiple Business Units, the company needed to rationalise its deployments, phasing out outdated systems in favour of a single, centralised solution. This would ease the management burdens associated with multiple systems, reduce the risk of product recalls due to inconsistent or inaccurate labelling, and reduce any pressure and disruption caused by compliance demands in this highly regulated industry.
Consolidation is key
Faced with these challenges, Teleflex launched an ambitious project to establish a comprehensive, highly advanced Global Labeling System. This would seek to replace over a dozen outdated labeling systems in operation worldwide with a single, centralised solution to increase user control and transparency over routine label and asset work. The Global Labeling System would also need to be fully integrated with other upstream and downstream systems such as the Oracle Agile PLM suite and an existing ERP system from SAP.
Challenges
- Disparate, non-standardized legacy systems spread across a global footprint
- Risk of product recalls
- Limited control and management of labeling operations
The long-term goals of the Global Labeling System project are aimed at introducing labeling consistency worldwide for every product range, by standardising workflows and businesses processes and providing employees involved in labelling with a core set of feature-rich tools and capabilities. This would in turn improve collaboration between sites and across geographies, reducing compliance risks and introducing sustained time and capacity savings.
As a cloud-based solution designed to establish centralised control over all labeling and artwork management within a company, Veraciti from Kallik represented a strong candidate to solve the pain-points experienced by Teleflex. The highly customisable nature of the solution, combined with extensive Kallik use cases in implementing Veraciti for global companies in highly regulated industries, led Teleflex to select Veraciti for the core of its new Global Labeling System.
Kallik technical experts and consultants have worked with the Teleflex team since 2015 to help make the Global Labeling System a reality, deploying Veraciti and onboarding specific production facilities and regions on a staggered basis to ensure minimal disruption to day-to-day business operations as legacy systems are phased out.
Solution
- Veraciti™
- Global Labeling System project
Kallik implementation expertise and technical support
A standardized approach to replacing legacy systems
Due to the significant scale and global nature of the Global Labeling System project, Kallik closely worked with the Teleflex team on a regular basis since project commencement in 2015, sharing best practice and methods developed throughout Kallik’s long-term history implementing Veraciti for global companies in the medical device sector.
"We have an excellent working relationship with Kallik, and their expertise in integrating Veraciti with third-party software and existing systems has been key to the continued success of the Global Labeling System," says Brian Cannon, Senior Project Manager at Teleflex. "Completion of the project will mark a major milestone for Teleflex in future-proofing our operations worldwide with standardised, feature-rich systems."
Benefits
- Single centralized solution for labeling and artwork management
- Simplified IT footprint for ease of management
- Significantly reduced risk of non-compliance and product recalls
The Global Labeling System continues to be rolled out and advanced for Teleflex sites worldwide today, with a majority of the 20 global facilities completed and fully operational. The project has involved migration of tens of thousands of product assets to Veraciti as part of the phase-out process of legacy labeling systems and elimination of data siloes.
Greater labeling control to eliminate recall risk
Teleflex today benefits from advanced labeling and artwork management capabilities, all achieved because of the centralised cloud-based Veraciti system. End-users benefit from standardized labeling processes and powerful features such as a dedicated asset search engine, enhanced phrase and translation management and end-to-end approval and audit trails. As a result, product recall issues have dropped to zero since implementation.
"Our work with Teleflex on supporting their vision for a Global Labeling System is another testament to the powerful interoperability and capabilities within our flagship Veraciti system,” says Dave Tarbuck, VP Global Customer Success at Kallik. "This project has looked beyond the goal of achieving a standardised labeling platform to deliver end-to-end benefits across the company, from factory print features through to effortless regulatory compliance.”