International biopharmaceutical company Cephalon enters a new stage of RFID drug electronic genealogy application
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Cephalon, an international biopharmaceutical company, plans to enter a new stage of RFID applications in its supply chain. The company will affix passive UHF RFID tags to cardboard shipping containers shipped from Tennessee’s third-party distribution center and serialize the EPC numbers of the tags. All goods leaving the warehouse will be labeled in the third quarter of 2008. Cephalon plans to use RFID and item-level serialization to implement electronic genealogy management of medicines in several steps in 2009. The container serialization system, software and integrated services provided by OATSystems are the next step. Later, Randy Bradway, deputy director of business operations at Cephalon, stated that the company hopes to begin labeling at least one category of drugs by the end of 2008, and gradually increase the types of labeled drugs next year.
Although members of the California Drug Administration postponed the requirement for electronic genealogy of drugs to 2011, Cephalon still hopes that the company and its wholesalers will install relevant systems to realize electronic drug genealogy management before the originally set deadline of 2009.
Cephalon hopes to start labeling at least one category of single-product drugs by the end of 2008, and gradually increase the types of labeled drugs next year
In the past few years, Cephalon has been testing RFID technology on the pallets and boxes of Kuanxinwan. In 2005, the Cephalon research team affixed EPC Gen 1 tags to the pallets and boxes of the Kuanxin pills and moved them in the warehouse to test the accuracy of the tag reading. RFID hardware providers ADT Security Services and OATSystems supply readers and help develop and implement this system.
In 2007, Cephalon began to put Alien Technology’s Squiggle EPC Gen 2 label on the boxes and pallets of the painkiller Fentora.
In the latest phase, Cephalon will label all the containers shipped out of the Tennessee distribution center and destined for wholesalers. When the cartons are sealed in the distribution center and are ready to be shipped, the labels will be read. When the distribution center receives and confirms an order, it will print a label containing the information about the drug being shipped. In the past, labels were only printed with barcodes and text. Now labels encoded and printed by Zebra printers will contain Alien Squiggle Gen 2 RFID chips. The workers found the medicines to be shipped in the warehouse and packed the medicines in containers. After loading, the worker seals the box and attaches an RFID tag, and then passes through a fixed reader connected to the back-end system.
When the data is transmitted to Cephalon’s SAP AII system, OATSystems software corresponds the ID code of the label to the SKU, expiration date, batch number, and drug type, explained Prasad Putta, founder and board member of OATSystems. Cephalon currently transports 3,800 containers per month, and plans to complete the labeling of all shipping containers in the third quarter of 2008.
When pharmaceutical wholesalers and retailers also adopt RFID systems, they can obtain RFID data and share it with Cephalon. At the same time, by labeling individual drugs, Cephalon can further establish a complete electronic pedigree. In the back-end system, the serialized ID code of a single medicine will correspond to the serialized EPC code of the shipping container.
“We established related partnerships early on,” said Brian Brown, deputy director of Cephalon logistics and analysis. To develop this system, the company worked with DT Security Services, OATSystem, SAP, SupplyScape and Systech International.
“Our think tank is very strong,” Brown said. “In the process of cooperation, we know very well what we are going to do now and in the future.”
Cephalon’s current plan is to keep pace with California’s original plan to implement electronic genealogy in 2009, so drug companies, wholesalers, and drugmakers can share product and container data. Some equipment has been installed in the previous test, including the SAP AII system of the distribution center, OATSystems software and Impinj reader.
“We believe that serialized containers are of great significance to the further implementation of electronic genealogy management,” Brown said. By carrying out this latest project, Brown said the company will continue to realize the value of RFID applications in the supply chain. “Cephalon hopes that wholesalers can join their team and use these RFID tags to share data with Cephalon.
The main research at this stage will focus on data analysis. “It’s easy to generate data, but you have to understand what the data represents,” Bradway said.
Because manufacturers can track products outside of the distribution center, the participation of wholesalers can make this data truly valuable, Bradway said. More than 20 wholesalers have installed RFID systems to varying degrees. When these wholesalers began to use container tags to share the reading results, Cephalon hopes to analyze the result data to understand the data transmission between supply chain members.
Bradway believes that the pharmaceutical industry cannot be slowed down because of the extension of the implementation period of California’s electronic drug genealogy. “We must speed up. Any drug company that relaxes due to the extension of the period is too naive and ignores the urgency of the matter.” He said.
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