|
|
|
Your Greatest Weapon Against Supply Chain Risk: Visibility
By Jean-Michel Issakidis, Business Solution Marketing Manager, Axway
Supply chains today are complex, incorporating massive networks of partners and distribution points. Building end-to-end supply chain visibility through the track & trace of flowing goods and data files may be critical to the sustainability and continued innovation of your company.
Whether your business is retail, financial services, packaging or pharmaceuticals, initiating a track & trace project requires a plan to determine the most important areas for investment of resources. Common areas for initial focus are:
- Product Safety - to prevent counterfeiting; safeguard product value and usefulness; reduce loss and theft; and facilitate recall processing.
- Brand Equity Protection - to avoid channel diversion to unauthorized resellers; prevent tampering of products; and protect margins.
- Supply Chain Optimization - to improve real-time order-to-cash management; streamline reverse logistics processing; and create dynamic, not static, visibility end-to-end.
Serialization and Serial Number Management
Serialization, especially across multiple locations, can be complex, expensive and risky. Axway solutions enable track & trace technologies and allow you set up a serialization initiative and thus capture, store and retrieve the tracked items' lifecycles, all along the operations chain. Serial numbers are guaranteed unique, and managed through central control. Serial number management is the foundation for product authentication, returns management, shipping accuracy, sales channel diversion detection, regulatory compliance and brand protection against counterfeiting and other threats.
Channel Diversion Detection and Parallel Trade Monitoring
Brand damage and consumer risk occur when channel diversion goes undetected. The ability to track products through the entire lifecycle allows your
Supply chain visibility beyond the boundaries of your organization allows you to work cohesively with trading partners while maintaining control of goods and data.
|
organization to rapidly detect diverted product in the supply chain. With Axway Track & Trace, distribution channel information is associated and managed with serial numbers and product master data. Armed with this data, your company can combat the issues of channel diversion and parallel trade in your industry.
Supply Chain Visibility
With the complex ecosystems of today, the supply chain is clouded with information and communication roadblocks, making it difficult to have complete control of your business. Supply chain visibility beyond the boundaries of your organization allows you to work cohesively with trading partners while maintaining control of goods and data. Axway Track & Trace allows you to capture events end-to-end, and achieve the visibility you need for a more agile, flexible, collaborative supply chain.
Field-Proven
Axway Track & Trace customers consist of healthcare and life sciences companies, parcel delivery organizations, product manufacturers and more. Initially, most of them started with limited, pilot track & trace projects involving very few product SKUs. Currently, every one of them benefits from full-scale deployment of their track & trace projects that leverage their initial investments. They are all able to tightly monitor their extended supply chain operations, mitigate their brand risk exposure, and optimize their logistics chains to achieve better agility and speed.
Axway's incremental track & trace solutions are GS1/EPCGlobal coding standards-compliant and EPC Information Services (EPCIS)-certified. We deliver end-to-end interoperable solutions that allow our customers to achieve reasonably fast return on investment (ROI), regardless of the initial scope of their project. Either for deploying a mass serialization project; to mitigate risk; or to optimize your supply chain, learn more at www.axway.com/track&trace.
| | Jean-Michel Issakidis is a Business Solution Marketing Manager at Axway.
| |
|
