TraceLink Inc., a leading digital network platform company, made a series of announcements that highlight the progress being made in the development of Opus, the company’s operating platform for Industry 4.0. These announcements include the launch of new software solutions on the platform, milestones in collective intelligence, additions to the partner ecosystem, the release of new Opus platform capabilities, and the expansion of the executive leadership team.

“I’ve been watching the development of the Opus platform with great interest,” said Alessandro De Luca, group CIO and head of information technology at Merck KGaA. “Today’s supply chain challenges exist outside the four walls of our organizations—things like traceability, demand fluctuations, supply disruptions and sustainability to name just a few. These are Industry 4.0 problems that can only be solved through the creation of digital networks, sharing processes with network partners and leveraging shared data across the industry. I see Opus and the capabilities that it brings as the operating platform for Industry 4.0 transformation.”

Launches First Supply Chain Work Management Solution on the Opus Platform: The first step for many organizations in their journey to Industry 4.0 transformation, the TraceLink Supply Chain Work Management solution allows any company in the supply chain to build collaborative networks across their trading partners to enhance the performance of their integrated supply planning and execution processes through better management of supply chain issues and planning exceptions like material shortages, short shipments, and forecast changes.

Partnership with Kinaxis: Kinaxis, a recognized leader in supply chain planning, is partnering with TraceLink to launch an out-of-the-box integration between TraceLink Supply Chain Work Management and Kinaxis’ Rapid Response planning platform. By uniting Kinaxis’ market-leading supply chain planning solution with digital network creation and supply chain work management capabilities from TraceLink, supply chain executives will rapidly access the multi-company execution tools necessary to improve their integrated supply planning and execution processes.

Product Availability Intelligence Enables Manufacturers to Predict Drug Shortages up to 90 Days in Advance with Greater Than 80% Accuracy: Product Availability Intelligence is a groundbreaking solution that will allow participating members of the Healthcare and Life Sciences value chain to predict and react to critical medicine shortages up to 90 days in advance with greater than 80% accuracy over current industry information sources. Created in partnership with leading pharmaceutical manufacturers, wholesale distributors, healthcare systems and retail pharmacies, Product Availability Intelligence applies machine learning to the movement of more than 30 billion serialized medicines across the TraceLink network of more than 287,000-member Healthcare and Life Science companies to predict drug shortages, and is the first realization of Collective Intelligence enabled by the Opus platform.

The Opus Compliance Framework in Preparation for Over 30 Country Compliance Mandates in Next Three Years: The new Opus Compliance Framework makes use of the Opus low-code platform and Opus Event Canonicals to accelerate the development of individual compliance applications. These efforts will reduce the effort of developing compliance applications by four times and also result in higher quality solutions by simplifying the overall compliance application architecture.

Enhancements to the Opus Digital Network Platform: The TraceLink Opus Platform, the operating platform for Industry 4.0, enables the creation of digital networks with a new class of multi-enterprise software applications built on the Opus low-code, no-code development environment. Major enhancements to the platform’s infrastructure, application layer, development environment and UI framework will enable many important improvements. Companies will be able to choose their data residency from data centers in different geographic regions, initially with Frankfurt as the second supported data region, and seamlessly create networks and integrate and exchange information with supply chain partners across data regions. Localization support will be provided for FIGS and multibyte languages. The user experience has been improved through the addition of new Opus Ensemble UI capabilities. Integration between apps on the Opus platform and third-party apps will be enabled through API tokens to authenticate and authorize API requests. Performance and scalability enhancements have been added along with improvements to CI/CD deployment automation. Performance monitoring has been upgraded with new health checks and additional cloud ops metrics capture and monitoring. Additionally, a new Opus admin app will allow customer self-management of multi-enterprise app networks and members on the networks.

Karl Waldman Named General Manager of Agile Supply Chain Organization: Karl Waldman brings a wealth of supply chain and digital network experience to TraceLink. Before joining, Karl was the VP of Retail at One Network Enterprises where he led the deployment of multi-enterprise applications. Karl has also held senior leadership positions at L7 Informatics, Retail Solutions Inc., i2 Technologies, and was co-founder of OATSystems. In his new role, Karl will lead the go-to-market strategy for the TraceLink portfolio of applications designed to bring agility and resilience to supply chain operations, including TraceLink Supply Chain Work Management.

Stephanie Hart Appointed to Board of Directors: Ms. Hart is currently the Senior Vice President of Operations at Warby Parker. During her tenure, Warby Parker went public through a direct listing, opened a second optical lab, and has maintained exceptional quality and customer service as the company continues to inspire and impact the world with vision, purpose, and style. Prior to joining Warby Parker, Ms. Hart was the Senior Vice President of Global Operations at Beyond Meat, where she was part of the leadership team that took the company public in one of the best performing IPOs by a US company in almost two decades. Ms. Hart has also held senior operating positions at Nestle and Jenny Craig.

“I am extremely proud of the TraceLink team and the milestones we are achieving in our quest to become the world’s leading digital supply chain platform company,” said Shabbir Dahod, president and CEO at TraceLink. “Our Opus platform has the power to revolutionize supply chains. Opus can transform the way supply chain partners work together, predict drug shortages, and ensure that medicines are tracked and traced to prevent theft and diversion. And this is just the beginning of what is possible with the Opus platform and the platform ecosystem that we are creating.”