Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - May 2008 - (Page 34)

need escalation procedures to get that information to the right people.” In some instances, the company may need to get a product back from a customer for further testing and evaluation. Schoem recommends having a standing relationship with a testing lab. “If you have a testing lab on retainer, which we encourage, you can be assured of getting them to focus on your problem without delay,” he says. Find the Products Once the scope of a problem has been identified, the next step is finding where impacted products are physically located in the supply chain. This step also has been complicated by the extension of supply chains to include many partners around the world and by the accelerated rate of commerce, which means products are disbursed more rapidly, says Berndt. “The brand owner has to be able to very quickly reach out and physically touch that product. This means knowing whether it is in storage, in transit, in a store available for sale or in a plant available for use as an ingredient, or whether it already is in the hands of a consumer,” she says. The key to this step is having good forward tracking and tracing technology that integrates or can be tied back to the recordkeeping done in the first step. “Some companies may be able again to get to the first level of track-and-trace relatively easily, but they lose that visibility when product enters a warehouse for storage or cross-docking,” says Rory Granros, director of process industry product marketing at Infor, Atlanta. “Sometimes this breaks down in packaging because we are seeing this whole proliferation of different packaging sizes, where one bulk product is packaged into multiple configurations. Many ERP systems can’t handle that effectively, so companies don’t maintain all of the levels of structure they need to track something all the way through.” Event management and collaborative solutions are important here, says Mantripragada. “Collaborative applications enable suppliers and partners to exchange information around the structure and content of the product itself as well as real-time visibility of the product’s status. Event management enables the actual tracking of the flow of products in the supply chain and enables us to quickly see where a product is and where it has been.” RedPrairie’s QA Recall application has QA Recall, is a web-based application that can be run from anywhere, he says. Some industries are making innovative use of leading-edge technologies like radio frequency identification and global positioning systems to help establish from-thesource visibility. “Intermec has worked with food growers that use GPS to determine where in the field something was picked, within a pretty narrow area,” says Rasmussen. Then, using RFID tags on the containers, companies can track this produce all they way to where it is handed off to the cleaning and packaging realms. The GPS and RFID data can be saved and tied to the lot number assigned the produce during processing, he says. Pharmaceutical companies also face stringent requirements to identify and track all ingredients that go into specific manufacturing batches. One best practice among these companies is to make certain that lots of active ingredients are not split among packages, says Anand Iyer, a fel- low at i2 Technologies, Dallas. “If you get a bottle of pills, you can be guaranteed that every pill in that bottle came from the same manufacturing lot, so if you identify one lot as defective, you can cleanly identify the subset of bottles that have pills from that particular lot.” Pharmaceutical manufacturers have a handbook of good manufacturing practices that cover these types of safety issues, Iyer says. In many other industries, however, companies are not ensuring this backward visibility or are using time parameters that are too large, says Marsh’s Schoem. “Some change time codes every month, which means that, at a minimum, they would have to recall a month’s worth of production,” he says. “Changing the date code daily or even hourly can dramatically limit the scope of a recall.” Another area that companies need to work on is in monitoring calls from customers concerning problems with a product, Schoem says. “Call centers need to be instructed in how to handle these calls and 34 MAY 2008

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Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - May 2008 Contents Editorial GL and SCS Exclusive Fast Forward Up Front Cover Story: 'Be Prepared Is Motto that All Companies Should Follow When It Comes to Recalls Here and There 1+1=One Opinion Can't Happen Here Industry Voices

Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - May 2008

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