TraceLink Ushers in the Agentic Industrial Revolution to Transform Healthcare and Life Sciences Operations for Global Supply Chains

Introducing Agentic Orchestration: Where Digital Experts Perceive, Reason, and Act

BOSTON, Oct. 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- TraceLink, the largest end-to-end digital network platform for intelligent orchestration of the supply chain, announced a new era in supply chain transformation at FutureLink in Barcelona last week with the introduction of Agentic Orchestration, powered by its OPUS (Orchestration Platform for Universal Solutions) architecture.

This marks a seismic shift—from manual supply chain operations to true agentic orchestration—where digital agents act as expert teammates, capable of perceiving what's happening across a customer's digital supply chain network, reasoning about it, and taking the right action under human supervision.

"The next industrial revolution will be orchestrated and agentic," said Shabbir Dahod, President and CEO of TraceLink. "Automation alone creates brittle systems. Agentic Orchestration -- powered by real-time data sourced through multienterprise transaction exchange and process collaboration -- brings digital experts and humans together to drive intelligent outcomes across the global healthcare supply chain—ensuring patients receive the right products, faster and more reliably than ever before."

From Digitalization to Agentic Orchestration

For more than a decade, TraceLink has led the life sciences industry in digitalizing end-to-end supply chains, connecting over 291,000 entities and 339,000 active, pre-integrated network links to enable real-time visibility, partner collaboration, and compliance.

With its unmatched scale and the full spectrum of end-to-end transactions and multienterprise processes already digitalized—from order-to-cash and procure-to-pay to recall management and regulatory compliance—TraceLink is uniquely positioned to deliver true agentic orchestration across the global supply chain network.

That digital foundation now evolves into the agentic era, where linked intelligence turns data into agent-assisted action. Agentic Orchestration represents the next revolution beyond automation—escaping the rigidity of traditional systems through agents that can reason, adapt, and act intelligently within human-defined guardrails.

"With traceability, MINT, and POET already transforming supply chain collaboration, agentic orchestration completes the vision," said Pasi Kemppainen, Director, Head of Global Supply Chain Traceability and Digital Strategy at Santen Pharmaceutical, and a FutureLink attendee. "TraceLink POET is the future of agentic supply networks and beyond."

At the heart of this transformation is a powerful new intelligence layer within OPUS that introduces Artificial Expert Intelligence (AExI)—the next transformation in supply chain orchestration:

• The Agentic Metadata Processing (AMP) Engine and OPUS Brain work together to understand context, reason through complexity, and guide intelligent decision-making across the network.
• Reasoning Artifacts (RAs) capture OPUS Platform concepts and are leveraged by the OPUS Brain to perform Meta-Reasoning on behalf of the Agents, which are driven by their Intents and Objectives - adapting dynamically to real-world conditions.
• Specialized Small Language Models (SLMs) bring domain expertise to each operational area, from manufacturing and logistics to quality and compliance.

Together, these components enable a network of agents acting as supply chain experts that continuously learn, orchestrate decisions, and collaborate with humans to improve outcomes across the global supply chain.

The Foundation: Accurate, Multienterprise, Real-Time Data

Agentic supply chain orchestration requires real-time, end-to-end supply chain data. The accuracy, completeness, and timeliness of multienterprise information determine the intelligence and reliability of every agentic decision.

Most AI initiatives stall because data remains fragmented and siloed across systems, formats, and partners. TraceLink eliminates that barrier through its Integrate-Once, Interoperate-with-Everyone™ Network capability, which provides:

• OPUS Platform : The industrial foundation for agentic orchestration—built to meet the highest standards of scalability, security, compliance, and resilience. OPUS unifies applications, data, and processes across the network to deliver real-time visibility, seamless integration, and trusted intelligence at scale.
• Track and Trace : A proven data backbone connecting thousands of companies and billions of serialized product events, ensuring authenticity, compliance, and confidence in every transaction.
• MINT (Multienterprise Information Network Tower) : A powerful B2B integration layer that harmonizes partner data and events across multienterprise processes, creating a shared, actionable view of the end-to-end supply chain.
• POET (Process Orchestration for Empowered Teams) : The multienterprise environment that transforms collaborative business processes into intelligent, agent-driven workflows—automating routine actions while preserving human oversight and control.
• OPUS Reports and Dashboards : A comprehensive suite of pre-built and customizable analytics that provide real-time visibility into supply chain performance, compliance, and partner operations—empowering teams to monitor, measure, and optimize outcomes with confidence.

This continuous, real-time data flow fuels the OPUS Brain—allowing agents to perceive conditions across the end-to-end supply chain, anticipate exceptions, and act decisively.

Agents Designed by Business Users, No Vibe Coding Required

TraceLink's approach empowers business professionals—not developers or vibe coders—to create and deploy digital agents through a no-code Agent Manager. Each agent is defined on a "say-and-see" basis through a structured reasoning model.

This allows supply chain, procurement, manufacturing, operations, commercial, and quality teams to design expert agents that orchestrate order management, inventory optimization, compliance processes, and much more—all while maintaining human oversight, governance, and complete audit trails.

Dynamic, agentically generated pages and dashboards reveal every reasoning flow with full transparency, accelerating time-to-value and ensuring trust in every decision.

"This is Artificial Expert Intelligence in action," added Dahod. "Agents that know your processes inside out, anticipate exceptions, and help your teams focus on what matters most. This is how we move beyond automation and into the agentic age of supply chain performance."

As these intelligent agents are created and refined, they will populate a growing catalog of reusable Agent Profiles—domain-specific digital experts that, by 2026, will form the foundation of TraceLink's Global Agent Marketplace, enabling customers and partners to configure, deploy, and share digital assistants across OPUS-powered solutions like MINT and POET, amplifying the collective intelligence of the Integrate-Once, Interoperate-with-Everyone™ Network and accelerating industry-wide innovation.

FutureLink Barcelona Highlights Industry's Collective Call for Courage, Collaboration, and Curiosity in the Age of Agentic AI

At FutureLink Barcelona in early October 2025, industry leaders emphasized that achieving the full potential of agentic AI begins with a strong data foundation — integrating internal systems and external partner signals to power intelligent, automated decisions across the supply chain. They urged organizations to focus GenAI investments on tangible, well-defined business problems, not experiments, and to lead with purpose by aligning AI initiatives to measurable outcomes such as improving OTIF, reducing waste, and enhancing productivity and responsiveness.

Speakers called for greater collaboration across the industry, encouraging companies to leverage the TraceLink platform to exchange information and accelerate collective progress. Attendees were reminded that transformation requires courage, open-minded leadership, and the endorsement of a shared vision. "We are all change agents in our organizations," one participant noted, "fighting for the good cause — and ultimately, for the patients."

The discussions reinforced that digitalization and AI will not replace humans, but enhance human effort by augmenting decision-making and enabling new ways of working. Curiosity was highlighted as a key driver of innovation: curiosity leads to discovery, learning, and knowledge, and "a curious mind is a young mind." With this spirit, participants expressed optimism that AI is worth the journey and that this moment represents a true inflection point for the industry: a chance to redefine how work is done across organizations, with transformation as a constant evolution. Several participants even proposed forming a "community of AI supply chain users" to continue learning and sharing best practices together.

For more information on how agentic orchestration can revolutionize your supply chain, contact us.

About TraceLink
TraceLink Inc. is the largest end-to-end intelligent supply chain platform for life sciences and healthcare, enabling end-to-end orchestration by connecting more than 291,000 healthcare and life sciences entities through its B2N Integrate-Once™ network. Leading businesses trust TraceLink to deliver complete global connectivity, visibility, and traceability of healthcare products, ensuring that every patient gets the medicines they need when needed, safely and securely.

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