How Pharma Can Find RFID's ROI

Operational Excellence & Lean Six Sigma assimilate RFID into their supply chains look ahead three to five years and see how they are suited to developing their internal supply chain landscape. What do you mean by “developing” the internal supply chain landscape? For one thing, it makes sense for companies to have active ingredient products manufactured overseas, such as in India and China. That doesn’t happen overnight, and its also a big supply chain issue. If I gain cost savings with the same quality and purity in a foreign country, how do I bring that back to the largest pharmaceutical market, the U.S.? Progressive companies are investing in RFID for solutions. RFID by itself really doesn’t have a good ROI. But RFID in terms of avoiding or handling counterfeiting and product recall can have a huge impact on ROI has a big impact. What industry trends are you seeing with RFID these days? Market leaders are using two strategies. Some want to try to understand a little about RFID, so they buy a point solution just to try to understand how the technology works. Then when they’re up to speed, they integrate this technology into their business process. Once this scenario moves into manufacturing, when suppliers are starting to ship materials with RFID tags, there’s the whole issue of how to modify the business process to use this information—the information that will go into a pedigree document for a product that is shipped, for example, to Florida. What solutions are you providing for RFID? From a supply chain perspective, we’re helping companies justify the ROI—for example, by reducing the cost of product recalls. I’ll tell you a story: We recently entertained two foreign companies that have recently merged. Parts of each of their IT landscapes are on SAP. The whole issue