The US-based Cognex Corporation, a company into designing, developing, manufacturing and marketing of machine vision sensors and systems, is expecting a huge potential for its standalone label inspection and data validation solutions including the smart camera vision systems in India as more companies are looking for simple and efficient solutions to comply with the requirements of drug regulators from various countries.

The Pharmaceutical manufacturers in India are working towards compliance with the new serialization requirements, or looking for a standalone label inspection and data validation solution that is ready for future traceability initiatives with support for global barcoding standards.

The company, which has recently launched a ready-to-deploy data capture and verification solution - In-Sight Track & Trace - designed to help pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers achieve unit-level product traceability in India, is aiming to capture market share in the Indian pharma industry, said John Lewis, market development manager, Cognex Corporation.

The recent global trend of pharma firms opting for leaner and cost-effective smart camera vision systems for tracking their products would be reflected in Indian pharma industry, especially in the multi national firms too and the company's plans are to explore this market opportunity.

The traditional approach of deploying turnkey serialization solutions that integrate Personal Computer-based vision systems has a much higher cost of ownership, since the PCs require more IT department oversight and management to deal with service pack updates and other items like virus protection software. “In India, we foresee similar trend especially in foreign-owned pharmaceutical manufacturers,” says Lewis.

“A new leaner, more cost-effective approach to track and trace demands new technology. That is why pharmaceutical manufacturers are increasingly opting for networked smart camera vision systems over PC-based inspection systems at the machine level. We see In-Sight Track & Trace having huge potentials in the Indian pharmaceutical market,” he added.

Apart, the move from the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare mandating GS1 standards for barcoding for drugs the government purchases is a positive sign for increased usage of such label inspection and data validation solutions.

Cognex’s In-Sight Track Trace, working with In-Sight vision, is equipped to read 1D and 2D barcodes, validate encoded data is accurate and correctly formatted, verify the accuracy of printed text and ensure it matches the contents of the code and check print quality and detect label misalignment. The product is also less expensive to install with a ready to deploy smart camera, which is less complex to validate and less costly to maintain than the traditional turn-key inspection systems, claims the company.

The company's product basket includes In-Sight vision systems, DataMan ID Readers and Verifiers, PC Vision software and Checker Vision Sensor offer different capabilities to solve specific gauging, inspection, guidance and identification problems. Cognex has also launched two new 1D barcode readers to its DataMan line of industrial ID Readers with fixed mount readers offering improved 1D barcode reading performance. The new readers offer the additional benefit of being easily field-upgraded to add 2D Data Matrix and QR code reading capability if application needs change in future, say company officials.