The Role of Electronic Labeling in Sustainable Practices

In a video interview with Pharma Commerce, Laura Johnson, senior director of sales, life sciences, Loftware, discusses how supply chain collaboration is becoming increasingly important, particularly in the life sciences and pharmaceutical sectors. According to Johnson, the adoption of cloud-enabled collaborative supply chains is crucial for improving real-time data sharing. This enhances visibility and coordination among internal stakeholders, external suppliers, co-manufacturers, and co-packers, who all play a role in the complex supply chain process.

This collaboration leads to faster decision-making and reduces operational costs, resulting in greater agility. Pharmaceutical organizations are better able to respond to market changes, regulatory updates, label changes, and potential disruptions. In addition, cloud-based systems facilitate regulatory compliance and advanced analytics, enabling more accurate demand forecasting. These systems also optimize inventory management, which directly contributes to improving patient outcomes and accelerating the time to market for new therapies.

Ultimately, cloud-based collaborative supply chains help streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve the overall efficiency of the pharmaceutical industry, benefiting both companies and patients.

Johnson also comments on how companies are exploring new ways to ensure that their products and shipments are protected, why the demand for supply chain transparency is continuing to gain momentum, and much more.

A transcript of her conversation with PC can be found below.

PC: Are there any other concepts powering the 2025 Supply Chain Trends Report that you’d like to point out, and how will they potentially change in 2026?

Johnson: The only other thing I think is important to mention is the increasing importance of sustainability, and the fact that sustainability really is starting to reshape the regulatory side and operational landscape for a lot of different businesses across all industries. But there certainly is a lot of pressure for pharmaceutical—as well as medical device companies—to really look at how they're packaging products, and take a very deep look at things like plastics, the packaging itself, and the use of that packaging, meaning, how easy is it to open but yet still being safeguarded, anything having to do with the documentation around packaging and the products, and moving more towards electronic types of access for updated information, which all lead to better sustainability. There's less waste.

Within the topic of sustainability, lots of the large global organizations that we work with have to report to their local agencies that amount of waste every year, and in some countries, areas, and regions, they're taxed on it, so if they can continue to help reduce the amount of discarded materials or minimize the amount of plastics that are being used, it just further supports sustainability.

Back to the report, I think that there were 79% of respondents that said that these stricter regulations and compliance requirements are absolutely pushing their businesses to adopt more sustainable practices. To your question about next year, it's only going to continue, in my opinion. We're really going to need to take a deeper look at that, and information coming out of our solutions could help them with that reporting: how many labels were discarded, how many eIFUs (electronic instructions for use] or electronic materials were used, versus something that was on a printed stock or inserted into the packaging. I think companies are recognizing that the cost-saving potential of sustainable practices and specifically, electronic labeling or enterprise labeling, are going to play a key role in supporting these.