With a view to support the pharmaceutical industry in its efforts to track the tubing used to produce pharmaceutical packaging made of glass, SCHOTT recently issued its millionth certificate for its FIOLAX glass tubing. These certificates help to identify the products shipped as tubing that are subsequently processed into pharma packaging, vials or syringes, for example.

These documents contain more detailed information on the dimensional quality and the quality of the glass. This enables pharma companies to track their packaging all the way back to the raw material glass tubing, if necessary. Traceability is currently one of the most pressing issues for the industry, closely related to more stringent requirements for quality and safety in manufacturing, shipping and administering medicines, thus making packaging an integral part of all safety considerations.

Incidentally, SCHOTT is the first company in the industry to allow certification for all of the pharmaceutical tubing for its manufactures back in 1999. The certificates are applied to the pallet in a clearly visible position and enable customers to inspect incoming shipments more easily because they contain plenty of detailed information. One part of the certificate can be detached and stored for documentation purposes and used to perform subsequent tracking and tracing inside the e-commerce portal.

SCHOTT’s certificates can be distinguished from the certificates that its competitors use mainly in terms of their great depth of detail and clarity. Besides a description of the product that includes an exact definition of all of the characteristics of importance to the customer, they also contain highly detailed specifications on tolerances. SCHOTT manufactures FIOLAX in Germany, Spain, Brazil and India. Due to its uniform worldwide quality standards the products delivered to customers are always of the same quality, irrespective of the production site. Each year, SCHOTT manufactures around one million kilometers of pharmaceutical tubing – that is 25 times the circumference of the earth.