In an increasingly complex global supply chain, how can technologies such as RFID and blockchain support security, safety and sustainability from producer to end consumer? Victoria Hattersley spoke to representatives from PragmatIC Semiconductor and SATO to explore this question. ©PragmatIC
RFID: TRACEABILITY IN A GLOBALIZED SUPPLY CHAIN T here has never, of course, been a time when product security was not important, but in today’s globalized marketplace – with all the factors that come into play – ensuring traceability along the supply chain is a more complicated, and yet vital, process than ever before. Added to this, there is growing pressure from both consumers and legislators for transparency from producers and suppliers. All of this calls for ever-more sophisticated tracking solutions. Traceability is a factor in all sectors, but in Europe the focus from a legislative perspective – as laid out in the FMD Directive – is still heavily on prescription pharmaceutical goods. “The system in the EU only covers prescription medicines,” says Alastair Hanlon, CCO at PragmatIC Semiconductor, “but the level of counterfeiting in OTC medicines and many other market segments is also very high and can also have very damaging outcomes. There are huge potential benefits to extending the system to more product categories. Then there are further opportunities to use the serialization for track and trace from factory to the consumer. While this is not a requirement yet (in the EU or the US), enabling track and trace will need significant investment from all actors in the supply chain.” As others have already pointed out on this platform, the EU could do worse than follow the example of Russia in this regard. Russia has taken the long view with its trace and trace system, setting up a series of public-private partnerships and rolling it out to include an increasing range of sectors from personal care to food and drink. “While Russia’s approach is characteristically bold,” says Alastair, “other countries have focused on prescription pharmaceuticals as the first products that require serialization and are likely to build from there. The key lesson from Russia is, whatever products you’re seeking to protect, these systems must be built with scale in mind.”
RFID – ‘An obvious choice for supply chain traceability’ In simple terms, the two most ubiquitous track and trace technologies in use today are barcodes and RFID. In this article, our focus will be on the latter, as, according to Alastair Hanlon, RFID has several advantages over the present barcodes on the market. “It can be added under the label, so doesn’t require real estate on the package of a minimum size; it’s difficult to copy and doesn’t need line of sight to read. Barcodes can also easily be damaged by wrinkles or overwriting, image defects etc. Large numbers of RFID tagged items can be read in a very short period of time, making stock control/inventory checking very fast and efficient. Couple this with the software and databases that have been developed to manage RFID records, and it is an obvious choice to use this technology for supply chain traceability.” Certainly, we have by no means exhausted the prospects for RFID and it will continue to have a key role to play within wider systems. “Where RFID’s future
Alastair Hanlon Packaging Europe | 17 |
