Itec Central has implemented a production printing solution for Watson Pharma South Africa that is enabling the pharmaceutical company to cost-effectively meet the regulatory requirement of submitting its product dossiers to the Medicines Control Council.
The company - the South African subsidiary of Watson Pharmaceuticals, one of the top four generic pharmaceutical companies in the world - turned to Itec Central for help after its previous supplier failed to correctly configure its printers to meet the requirements of the Medicines Control Council. Itec Central had only two weeks to set up a new production printer that met Watson Pharma's needs.
The complexity of this project lay in the fact that the production printer would need to be configured to print documents in the exact format demanded by the Council from the EXTEDO eCTDmanager software, says Deon Kruger, IT manager at Watson Pharma South Africa. eCTDmanager is an off-the-shelf electronic submission management solution.
“All documents were previously submitted to the Council in hardcopy format, but the Council has decided to transition towards electronic submission of regulatory documents,” says Kruger. “Until this transition is complete, we also need to submit print dossiers to the Council. We needed Itec to urgently install a solution that would allow us to print these documents in the correct format.”
Chad Stuart, Itec Central's sales director, says Itec chose to install an Itec Pro 950 production printer for Watson Pharma since it needed an industrial-strength printer able to process 100 000 images a month or more at a low cost per page.
This printer combines high output speed and a range of finishing capabilities with excellent image quality and cost performance. But the challenge of the project was to configure this solution to print, sort and staple pages from the eCTDmanager software in exactly the right format, says Stuart.
A particular challenge that the previous vendor could not overcome was that of allowing for duplex printing. Itec Central set up a production printer at its own office to simulate the Watson environment and set out to understand the intricacies of the EXTEDO software.
After spending some time experimenting with the settings and getting to know the quirks of eCTDmanager, Itec Central was able to deliver a solution that met Watson Pharma's requirements.
Says Suzie Truran, office manager at Watson Pharma South Africa: “Itec did a fabulous job with this project, delivering a high-quality solution within our tight timeframe of two weeks. We have been consistently impressed with their service and support throughout our relationship.”
This production-printing contract extends a long relationship that Itec has with Watson in South Africa as one of its primary suppliers of general office printers. Another benefit that Itec brings to the Watson Pharma printing environment is the proprietary Sentry remote management solution.
Sentry automates the reporting of many common service and maintenance issues of document output devices, leading to higher levels of uptime and faster turnaround times for repairs when a fault arises.
For more information, Chad Stuart can be contacted on chad@iteccentral.co.za or visit www.itecgroup.co.za.
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