Closed loop visibility for the extended enterprise to enable product recall

Product recalls usually involve industrial or consumer products, such as tools, machines, cars, foods, drugs, household appliances and children’s products. Recalls may be caused by a design defect, contamination or misbranding. The losses can mount up; in addition to the direct costs of the recall, they may include loss of customer goodwill and the company’s name.

A review of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Web sites demonstrates the frequency of product recalls. For example the healthcare related recalls in 2008 for drugs, medical devices and biological material below paints a picture of how bad and real of a problem this is today.

The impact of a recall of any of these just the category above has significant impact on safety - huge liability exposure for the institution that misses a recall notice. They require very timely response in that is is common for only one "batch" of an item to have a recall problem. The seriousness of this problem and the fallouts include:

• Impact on company’s bottom-line
• Impact on people’s lives
• Plummeting of public confidence
• Continued presence of dangerous non-recalled products in supply chain

All in addition to putting a damper on consumer benefits from a globalized supply chain in a ‘flat’ extended enterprise world…

Given this, can any organization not afford to have an efficient, and comprehensive proactive product recall strategy, one that prevents the contamination of the downstream supply chain via an early warning system based on real-time visibility, in place?

Solution:
The ground-breaking S3Edge ‘On-Demand’ Product Recall solutions is a 3 tier hosted solution that utilizes the visibility provided by RFID data ‘On-Premise’ and ‘On-Device’ to enable a federated and scalable recall system which:

1. Enables supply chain managers to ask: “Where are my products right now?” and get a response back in real-time
2. Facilitates publishing a product recall alert, and enable stakeholders in the supply chain to instantaneously get a response to “What products within my 4 walls need to be recalled”
3. Allow the stakeholders to schedule and process a recall in-house, and be able to communicate the same to the manufacturer.

In the example of the medical units to be recalled, the S3 On-Demand Recall solution would work in the following manner:

1. All the items are tagged by the manufacturers to enable visibility across the extended enterprise.
2. A manufacturer will be provided with a login to central web site to register and recall of any batch of the items they have shipped. The manufacturer can optionally register the expiration dates of all items shipped as a services to be used by the others in down-stream supply chain.
3. In the simplest form, a Distributor uses a GSM / 3G network connected RFID reader provided by S3 Edge with software On-Device, a shipping clerk could walk around the warehouse at regular intervals, and the device would detect all items that have been recalled or that are past there expiration date. The items detected would include medical devices, drugs and any biologicals that they inventory.
4. A more complex Distributor would utilize the S3 RTVS Warehouse Visibility solutions to automate additional real-time workflows for receiving, put-away (slotting), cross-docking, and shipping
5. A Pharmacy, Clinic, Hospital, or Doctor’s office could also utilize the same network connected reader for personnel to inspect inventory in-house or on pharmacy shelves and the device would detect all items that have been recalled or that are past there expiration date. The items detected would include medical devices, drugs and any biologicals they carry. They may also utilize additional workflows having to do with receiving quantities of stock of items, receiving notifications that a recalled item may be in their inventory, and tracking the physical location of these items via the interaction of the S3 On-Device and On-Premise systems surfacing the visibility provided by RFID tags on items in inventory.

The following pictorial showcases how a recall process would be deployed and executed On-Demand with support On-Premise and On-Device.

Benefits

1. An early warning system with the ability to utlize real-time visibility to enforce a proactive recall for removal of tainted goods from the supply chain in a reliable manner
2. Higher degree of checks and balances in place to prevent the tainted goods from reaching the consumers hands in the first place
3. The ability for an organization to swiftly respond to a product recall notification saving enormous expenses that are typically associated with post recall fallouts
4. Peace of mind to the end customer by drastically reducing unknown usage of recalled items
5. Electronic audit trails across the extended enterprise for seeking and removing tainted products from the supply chain
6. Internet scale, secure, high-available architecture to aggregate content from and distribute recall notifications in real-time to affected locations

Our strategic partnership with S3Edge allows Microsoft BizTalk RFID users to exploit the Speedway® reader’s advanced capabilities and performance. I highly recommend S3Edge as a partner to work with in building end-to-end solutions on the Microsoft RFID platform.