Supply Chain Management and Automatic Identification Management Convergence: Experiences in the Pharmaceutical Scenario

Abstract

The need to implement and guarantee effective item-level tracing systems is becoming more and more important for a wide range of business applications, such as manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and anti-counterfeiting. Among these, the pharmaceutical supply chain, with millions of medicines moving around the world and needing to be traced at item level, represents a very interesting reference scenario. Furthermore, the growing counterfeiting problem raises a significant threat within the supply chain system. Recently, several international institutions (e.g. Food and Drug Administration, European Medicines Agency, European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, GS1) are encouraging the use of innovative solutions in healthcare and in the pharmaceutical supply chain, to improve patient safety and enhance the efficiency of the pharmaceutical supply chain, with better worldwide drug traceability (FDA, 2004). Currently, the most popular auto-identification technology is optical one. Although the bar code (oneor bi-dimensional) is a very low cost solution, there are many valid reasons for not considering it as the primary auto-identification technique (Schroeter, 2008) in the near future. In fact, every kind of bar code technology requires line-of-sight (LoS), it cannot be written or read in bulk, it can be easily counterfeited, it can limit the speed of packaging line operations, etc. On the contrary, RFID (Finkenzeller, 2003) technology promises to optimize the critical processes in the Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems and to improve the patient safety, resolving problems of traditional optical auto-identification solutions. Passive RFID tags can be classified according to the frequency band used and the type of coupling between tag and reader antennas. The use of RFID solutions, in particular those working in Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band, could easily exceed the previous performance problems justifying the initial investment required by a process re-engineering of the pharmaceutical supply chain. Recent works (Uysal, 2008; De Blasi, 2010; Catarinucci, 2010) have highlighted that passive UHF RFID tags represent the more suitable solution for item-level tracing systems in a supply chain. Another fundamental element that is increasing exponentially the diffusion of the RFID in the automate logistics processes is the asserting of some international standards related to goods traceability, such as EPCglobal (Barchetti, 2009; Thiesse, 2009), GS1 (Global Standard 1) (Barchetti, 2010) and ebXML (Electronic Business using extensible Markup Language) (Barchetti, 2010), which are just a few interesting examples. The EPCglobal consortium,