Nov. 12, 2008 – VP of Healthcare Innovations for Axway, a leading pharmaceutical supply chain solution company, Paul Fowler shares his thoughts on the industry's track and trace needs.

We know that Axway is very involved with many of the largest pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors. Can you tell us about the track and trace work that you are doing with them?

FOWLER: Absolutely. As everyone knows, counterfeiting and diversion of pharmaceutical products has been in the news over the last several years. During the last few years, government agencies have been trying to enact legislation addressing the problem.

What we have is an integrity product suite that allows our customers to essentially implement an ePedigree and product serialization track and trace program. An electronic pedigree is described by various U.S. laws as the ability to provide an electronic chain of evidence for their products through their supply chain and through distributors.

Which customers, what type of customer mostly ask for this, was it the manufacturers or the distributors that saw the need first?

FOWLER: We originally entered the ePedigree market in the distribution space as we already had the three major distributors as customers. They were driven by regulatory requirements, but realized the long term value a serialized supply chain could have. In addition, manufacturers realized that this could be used for product security, brand protection and anti diversion.

Obviously, a lot of our readers are cheering on RFID; but, could you tell us what technologies you are currently using. You are in the software end of it, correct?

FOWLER: Right. You could consider us essentially the enabling middleware. We collect information, make sense of it, rationalize it, track it, trace it, transmit it to customers and others in the eco system that actually put it back in their ERP system. So, we are, from the front-end aspect, a little bit agnostic. We are working with customers who are using RFID technologies, barcode technologies, and others as well.

Are you seeing any difference in terms of accuracy or efficiency between barcode 2D or RFID?

FOWLER: Well, certainly in the distribution space. Because of the massive amount of volume RFID is preferred. The three largest distributors can ship up to seven million items a night, in a very short time frame. It is not practical to take each one of those seven million items and scan individual barcodes. Clearly RFID is seen as the way to actually move the product through the supply chain in the time frames needed.

Manufacturers are leaning a little bit more toward 2-D barcode because of the ease of implementation and they already have the product lined up. But, once it is packaged, it becomes impractical from a distributor point of view

When Axway is looking at track and trace technology, what is it to? What solution? What problem is trying to be solved? Is it a matter of saving time or is it the accuracy of the system?

FOWLER: I think there are two or three problems being solved. First is the problem of compliance with various federal, state government regulations relevant to this. There are regulations in the U.S. around ePedigree and track and trace. There are regulations in Europe that are being proposed, in France and Turkey, specifically. So, the first problem is complying with regulations.

Beyond that it is really providing visibility and transparency to the supply chain. By being able to track the product, cross spot to verify that it got there, and provide the analytics to make sense of that, it helps to make real time business decisions about routing and efficiency of routing and diversion.

Now, I assume the product integrity would play a part in this. Can you tell us about that?

FOWLER: We have seen that in addition to tracking a product from place to place, some of our customers keep temperature logs, location logs and timing logs. Actually, we have customers that create score cards for various vendors to ensure on time delivery quality. So it is not just integrity, it is not just the opportunity to detect a counterfeit, but also the quality of the product that moves through the supply chain is important.