Recognising the future of IDentification

It has been suggested that nearly 10 per cent of drugs worldwide are counterfeit with roughly US$32bn of legitimate corporate sales lost each year. This number is predicted to be US$75bn by 2010 (World Health Organisation).

Packaging is often seen as the least important part of a pharmaceutical supply chain with no therapeutic value. In fact, it is a vital when dealing with the problem of counterfeiting. Tracking technologies can be used in conjunction with packaging to allow manufacturers to trace legitimate products from commissioning through to the decommissioning and provide the manufacturer with peace of mind.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one such technology, which is now emerging as a contender in the supply chain arena. A tag that can be placed on any traceable unit (e.g. bottle, case, pallet), RFID offers a viable alternative to linear bar codes. In fact, when applying a tag to packaging on the manufacturing line, it stands above linear alternatives like the 2-Dimensional bar code, which requires the production line to work below optimum speed.

As an anti-counterfeit measure, RFID allows unique identification of a product in seconds. The need to purchase large quantities in a field survey and subject every unit to rigorous lengthy testing in the lab is redundant. Information is captured from RFID tags during manufacture and tracked throughout the product life cycle. When the RFID package label is scanned, this information can be pulled directly from the central repository, providing details of whether the serial number is still valid, what and where the product should be. If the location where you bought a product is not in sync with the receiving event, a red flag is raised.

Raising the red flag for counterfeit products is not limited to these sporadic field studies. Business applications that sit on top of the central data repository for RFID data can also be used to identify misdemeanours in the supply chain. For example, we provide counterfeit detection and diversion detection applications for to a number of our clients in the pharmaceutical industry. These technologies flag up unexpected or impossible events such as duplicated serial numbers as well as help manage the huge amount of RFID data in any supply chain. In fact, a data management system is crucial to prevent inundation from the vast amount of tag information. Although tags and the network are key parts of overall solution, it is useless without the right services to handle the information.

As pharmaceutical packaging continues to evolve, larger organisations are looking to expand tracking technology on a global scale. A pharmaceutical’s final destination is decided increasingly later in the product life cycle so the ability to track products across oceans allows companies to keep track of their merchandise wherever it lands up.

As a result, many pharmaceutical manufacturers are now looking to implement a central organisational structure. Centralising brand protection and monitoring activities to a single department means an international strategy can be designed for implementation at a local level. Product visibility is aggregated and put in a central repository that can be accessed by both internal users and external partners worldwide. After all, visibility is paramount for secure, cost-effective and efficient operations between the manufacturer and its trading partners. In addition, standards, like EPCIS (used for exchanging electronic product code information), ensure that visibility in an organisation is optimised through ensuring that all data users can find the information that they need.

This central organisational structure can also help meet the increasing number of compliance requirements in specific regions and at an international level. A number of European countries have individual compliance legislation, which will shortly be expanded across the EU. Manufacturers must be able to keep up with changing legislations as they happen without needing to revamp company strategy at every turn. After all, if a company is not legislation compliant it cannot trade. A central organisational structure simplifies this process while still allowing a degree of flexibility between local offices.

In the current climate, businesses across the board are looking to retain every possible penny of profit to ensure that they emerge unscathed. For pharmaceutical companies, this means seriously considering protection of the supply chain against the growing number of counterfeit products. Businesses need to be able to track every single unit of their output instantaneously while ensuring that they are always able to trade in a legislation-heavy market place. Now is the time for pharmaceutical manufacturers to consider RFID as the right solution for them and recognise it as the technology of the future.

Kim Loughead is director, solutions marketing, track & trace of Axway