December 16, 2018
By Joe Schutte
In this blog series, we’re covering four key tenets of total product security and traceability. In our first three posts, we focused on insight, security, and scalability. In this, our final installment, we will take a closer look at velocity.
When you think of today’s manufacturing landscape, fast is likely one of the first words that comes to mind: fast-moving production lines, fast-approaching deadlines, faster-than-ever customer expectations. But what about fast-moving data?
In today’s fast-moving manufacturing environment,
at a moment’s notice.
Data is the lifeblood of the manufacturing environment. It empowers manufacturers to ensure products uphold integrity standards, comply with relevant regulations, verify authenticity throughout the supply chain, and make meaningful process improvements. But last minute’s data can’t solve this minute’s challenges. The usability of manufacturing data really comes down to having the right data at the right time.
In today’s fast-moving manufacturing environment, operators must be able to access and harness high-velocity data at a moment’s notice. Let’s explore what data manufacturers need and when they need it:
A single compromised component can have monumental implications, costing thousands or even millions of dollars to identify, remove, and replace. A large determinant of how much a product compromise will cost a manufacturer is at what stage of production errors are identified and how efficiently affected pieces can be isolated and removed.
That’s where real-time data comes in. Manufacturers that can collect and harness the high-velocity data rapidly moving throughout their manufacturing environment in real time are able to identify component-, product-, and batch-level compromises as they occur—instead of after the fact. This real-time identification empowers rapid resolution, keeping wasted resource costs down and production on the move.
What’s better than catching and resolving errors immediately to minimize waste? How about resolving problems even before they manifest? For manufacturers that are able to aggregate and analyze data insights from across the supply chain, such an ideal can become a reality.
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Thriving in today’s manufacturing reality requires businesses to harness historical data to make more informed decisions. This holds particularly true in combatting today’s advanced counterfeiting attempts. In recent years, the gray market diversion rate has grown approximately 15%, with estimates anticipating it will reach $1,500 billion globally. A recent report showed that 75% of companies are concerned about selling gray market products to end customers.
With the use of high-velocity data insights, however, manufacturers can proactively identify gray market diversion points the moment a product is scanned in an unapproved site. These points can then be shut down, providing manufacturers the ability to dramatically improve the security of their supply chains and achieve peace of mind that every batch will arrive to its final destination without compromise.
A manufacturer’s responsibility over its products does not end at purchase. Rather, manufacturers are liable for product errors and compromises from purchase through end of life. With many manufacturers producing billions of products annually, upholding lifetime traceability and security requires meticulous tracking and record-keeping from the very start.
Lifetime traceability is also an issue of high-stakes data keeping—because failure to uphold product data until end of life can have costly consequences. Consider, for example, the 410 product recalls issued by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 2015 and the 10 companies in the U.S fined with civil penalties that same year. When product issues arose, the ability to recall highly-precise data would have empowered rapid and highly-targeted recall efforts to minimize a manufacturer’s cost of resolution and maximize its responsiveness to consumer concerns.
Whether addressing issues in real time, before they occur, or after the fact, successful problem resolution directly correlates with timely data availability. Yet, in the rapidly moving factory environment, many manufacturers are just trying to keep up—leaving high-velocity data tracking by the wayside.
With Ashton Potter, we know that today’s manufacturing environments require non-disruptive data traceability built to handle billions of rapidly moving items. Built to operate at the pace of business, our ProLinc product security solution houses and processes massive quantities of high-velocity product insights in real time. Protecting data via a Blockchain-enabled database, ProLinc empowers manufacturers with rapid access to the data they need to uphold product security at scale.
Looking for a solution that operates at the pace of business? Contact Ashton Potter today to get started.
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Tags: counterfeiting, data, recalls, velocity