Beyond Jugaad | The New Reality of Track & Trace Modernization
In India, we often use the word ‘Jugaad’— a Hindi term that refers to a clever, improvised workaround engineered to solve an immediate problem with limited resources, like a quick fix. Jugaad is creative. It’s scrappy. It’s often heroic. But it’s also fundamentally temporary. And yet, across global pharma operations, jugaad has silently become part of the Track & Trace operating model.
Over the last several years, I’ve spoken with several leaders who tell me a similar story: they never chose to stay tied to rigid, outdated serialization and compliance platforms. They were cornered into it — by regulatory pressures, fear of downtime, audit risk, and the reality that replacing the system feels like performing open-heart surgery on a running plant. So teams do what they must: they patch, improvise, and “just make it work.”
But jugaad is not a strategy. It is a symptom of systems that can no longer meet current operational realities.
Why Leadership Ends Up Supporting the Status Quo
Most pharma leaders are practical. They optimize for continuity, audit readiness, and zero disruption. A Track & Trace system, no matter how old, feels safer than the risk of introducing change. To keep manufacturing running, organizations unconsciously drift into a pattern of functional improvisation:To keep manufacturing running, organizations unconsciously drift into a pattern of functional improvisation:
- Temporary arrangements that become business-critical tools
- Excel-driven reconciliation substituting for missing features
- Middleware that exists only to survive the next dispatch
- Tribal knowledge held by a few senior operators
This model works, until it doesn’t. Every workaround extends the life of the system, but it also deepens operational fragility, slows exception handling, and increases audit vulnerability.
Four Structural Issues with Legacy Track & Trace Systems
1) Integrations designed for a world that no longer exists
Legacy systems can’t natively handle today’s mix of IoT sensors, diverse line equipment, or cloud-based partners. Custom adapters patch the gap but add latency and new points of failure.
2) Missing features quietly replaced by human effort
While legacy players push updates slowly, Regulatory changes roll out fast and furious. Plants respond with manual checks, excel-based pack handling, and reconciliation outside the system.
3) Painful upgrades that stall growth
Upgrades require long planning cycles, professional services teams, revalidation, and downtime. Many companies skip upgrades for years, creating a widening gap between what they need and what the system can deliver. Lock-in becomes structural.
4) Limited real-time visibility
Most legacy platforms lack true observability. When exceptions appear, teams dig through logs, compare files, and depend on senior staff to find root causes. Slow diagnosis = slow recovery = operational risk.
When Tolerance Turns Into Liability
Leadership tolerates legacy systems until the cost becomes undeniable:
- Repeated quality incidents
- Escalating reconciliation hours
- Missed regulatory windows
- Packaging lines stoppage for serialization exceptions
- Inability to scale products or markets rapidly
That’s when companies start exploring alternatives, but remain scared of disruption.
The AltiusHub Story: How We Do It Differently
When we started AltiusHub, we set out to solve one core problem: “How do we let pharma modernize without disrupting production?”. Instead of big-bang cutovers, we designed a parallel deployment model that respects how real factories operate and how real teams adopt change.
- Start with one product on one line
- Run it fully on AltiusHub in parallel with the legacy system
- Validate performance, exceptions, and compliance outputs in real time
- Scale to the next product, next line
- Retire the legacy system only after ALL products and lines have migrated
This approach removes fear from the modernization journey.
Why This Approach Actually Works
- Supply Chain Teams adopt gradually, not overnight
- Quality Teams approves incrementally, reducing validation pressure
- IT Teams avoids high-risk cutovers and keeps traceability uninterrupted
- Leadership sees real performance data, not vague promises
This approach derisks the migration and makes “replace” look far less scary than “repair.”
My Two Cents: Jugaad is admirable, but not scalable
If your team spends more time maintaining the system than using it, the system is no longer a solution — it’s a liability. A line-by-line, product-by-product transition path gives you the courage, control, and clarity to upgrade without chaos.
Modernizing Track & Trace doesn’t need to be a leap; it can be a safe, gradual transition. That’s the path we’ve built at AltiusHub.
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Frequently asked questions
Patching a legacy track and trace pharma system adds workarounds on top of an architecture that does not fundamentally change. Each new market, product, or regulatory requirement adds more patch complexity. The maintenance burden compounds with every change, making the system progressively harder to update and more fragile under audit.
The risk of migrating from a legacy track and trace pharma system is real but manageable, and it depends almost entirely on how the migration is structured. There’s high risk in a big-bang cutover but in a parallel, line-by-line migration, the existing system stays live until each product-line combination is validated on the new platform
Line-by-line replacement of pharma track and trace software keeps every packaging line except the one being migrated running on the legacy system. One line changes at a time. There is no plant-wide cutover and hence production downtime is limited to the individual line being transitioned, not propagated across the entire site.
Legacy track and trace pharma systems use tightly coupled architectures where compliance logic, data models, and partner interfaces are hard-wired into the core system. A regulatory change such as a new data field, a revised submission format requires an internal rebuild rather than a configuration update, triggering validation cycles each time.
Parallel deployment of a new track and trace solution lets supply chain and quality teams validate real outputs like audit trails, EPCIS events, exception logs in a live production environment while the legacy system remains operational. Quality and compliance confidence is built on that real-world performance record, not on a vendor demonstration in a controlled environment.
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