Thomas Halfmann is founder and managing partner of HGP. HGP is a healthcare industry consulting company with offices in Switzerland, Germany and Singapore. Before founding HGP, Thomas was Global Head Biopharmaceutical Operations IT and Head of the Global MES Program, both at Novartis. Thomas is an expert in paperless manufacturing, business process analysis and modelling, project management, quality management, and computer system validation with more than 20 years experience in the healthcare industry.

The pop in your job? "Working with highly motivated and skillful people and being creative every day to solve complex problems."

Driven by Healthcare Providers, the Open-SCS initiative directly addresses the Healthcare Industry’s Product Serialization Regulation Wave of the next decade. The Open SCS Working Group (Open-SCS) is partnered with the OPC Foundation to develop an open source standard in the Packaging Serialization Global Name Registry and an associated set of subscription-based work products. The open standard and work products are focused on the standardization of data exchanges for Healthcare packaging serialization and the aggregations between a Healthcare provider’s enterprise serialization management function and their product packaging lines. This includes interfaces between Levels 2-to-3 and 3-to-4 for Level 2 plant (line and equipment) and supply chain packaging serialization activities (distribution centers (DC) and warehouses) and Level 3 functions (plant and warehouse operations management). The scope of the 2016/17 work products focuses on data exchanges for 6 proposed use cases in two data exchange categories: 1. Mandatory Services and 2. Support Services which are addressed in 6 common Packaging Line Serialization System Configurations.