Rob Ryckman is VP of Sales and Marketing for CCL Label’s Health Care Division. CCL Label is a world leader in specialty packaging and labelling solutions for consumer products and healthcare markets.

CCL Label is the industry leader in pharmaceutical  RFID labels providing a multi-platform RFID solution.  What are some of the national RFID pilot programs you’ve been involved with?

Ryckman: The pilot phase is really a situation of the customer, not ours. We are commercialized, we are mature. We are 10 years into manufacturing RFID now. There are customers who are just starting today in a pilot, who don’t know anything about our findings, they are just getting started. So, I don’t think the pilot stage of RFID for the customer base is really going to go away, in the next two or three years. It is going to exist until the product becomes more mature. But we have commercial online manufacturing equipment and customers and products that are out in the mainstream currently.

I know you do packaging. Are some of your RFID offerings integrated within the packaging itself as opposed to labels that are applied to packages?
 
Ryckman: I am not exactly sure what you mean by packaging. Packaging to me is every single component that goes into packaging a product. It may be a container, it may be a label, it may be a shrink sleeve, or it may be a blister foil, a tieback, or insert or an outsert.

We are providing what we call packaging components – labels, booklet labels, inserts, outserts, foils, tiebacks, things like that. So our product offering for RFID mirrors our regular product offering. We can put RFID into anything.

Our platform is very flexible, so we make RFID identification cards, or we make RFID wristbands or we make RFID labels, or RFID shrink sleeves.

If you were to give a quick overview of where the pharmaceutical end of the industry is right now, how would you characterize that?

Ryckman: We predominantly supply to manufacturers, so our end customers are the large pharmaceutical names that would be household names.

How would you characterize where the pharmaceutical manufacturers are at in regard to RFID? Are they excited about it?  Are they being pulled in yelling and screaming? 

Ryckman: I really couldn’t comment on whether they are excited or not. My opinion is that they are all at different stages. Some people don’t want it, they just see it as a cost adder. Some people don’t like to be regulated or told what to do. Some people are excited, some people understand there is a benefit to them or an ROI, so it is really all over the board. I really don’t believe there is a general consensus in the market.

I literally get calls every day from people saying ‘hey, I understand I have got to put RFID on my product now because of California ePedigree, can you help me with that?’ What they don’t understand is RFID and ePedigree are two different things. I hear that everyday.

So, you are still in the education phase, it sounds like.

Ryckman: Very much so.
 
If you were to segregate out the other non-pharmaceutical health care clients that you have, how many companies are buying RFID labels or packaging in the pharmaceutical world, besides the large companies like Merck and Pfizer?

Ryckman: Very few. I have thousands of regular customers and I may have a handful of RFID customers.

Are there pharmaceuticals manufacturers that are not even involved with RFID yet?

Ryckman: Many. You say ‘involved’, but their level of involvement is such that they probably have some guy who is the specialist in the research, so if you want to know about RFID, the answer is ‘go ask Jim over there, cubicle 19 and he will tell you everything he knows.’ But are they using it? No. Do they have it set up? No. Do they have a lab? No.

How many pharmaceutical manufacturers are there?

Ryckman: Hundreds.
 
Is it correct that you would only hear conversationally from your manufacturing clients about how it’s going in the marketplace? You wouldn’t know their reactions in terms of whether retailers are getting benefit out of that?

Ryckman: Right. I understand where you are trying to go with this. All you are really going to get is people’s opinions. You are going to call one company and they are going to tell you ‘way to the right.’ You are going to call the next company, and they are telling you ‘way to the left.’

So, you could deduct what you want from that, but people are going to tell you different things. Some are going to tell you ‘it’s the greatest since sliced bread, we use it, we have got a great ROI and our distribution down the line may love it. There is such a great benefit. And it is just lovely and wonderful.’  And you are going to call the next guy and he says ‘we use it, but there is no benefit. It is just a cost adder and it is not the most practical solution. I could do almost everything with a bar code for hundreds of the price.’ So the responses are all over the place.

For CCL products in this market, is there anything that is most sought by the manufacturers? What are the two or three RFID applications that are most commonly used currently in the pharmaceutical supply chain in your view?

Ryckman: The most common are serialization or pedigree type of activities, where certainly RFID is one good vehicle to deliver that. That is a good one.

Secondly, there is a lot of activity in RFID around brand protection, using it as a covert brand protection device.

And then thirdly, there’s the famous Wal-Mart application: inventory management can be a really good RIO to be realized with RFID on inventory management.

And I think the pharmacy companies really lean towards those three things. One of their problems might be counterfeiting or diversion, or it might be pedigree, or track and trace. And the third one might be inventory management, i.e. returns.

The issue of aging stock, the first-in-first-out of inventory, that is the biggest hot button, and they try to work towards what other benefits to get out of the investment.  If we are going to take on the cost, what else can we get out of it?

I think a lot of them are still in the stage of ‘let’s do the case of pallet type labeling so we can cut our teeth and learn our lesson.’ So I would state that a lot of pharmacy companies aren’t at the item level yet, but our pipeline and projects is very full. There is a lot of activity on that side, but they definitely would fall into the pilot category.