Interview

'RFID lends itself into a lot of business applications'

RFID seems an answer to the counterfeiting stricken pharma industry. Arun Ramachandran, Head of Pre-sales and Professional services of Sybase talks to Katya Naidu on the significance of this technology.

What kind of value can RFID add to pharmaceutical distribution?

The objective of using RFID is to assist in the location and tracking of things. When you look at a warehouse where different materials are stocked, knowing how much material is present at a point of time, you would require doing a manual count. This is time consuming and error prone and there can be cases of miscounts. RFID allows you to do away with such problems by having tags associated with units of material. If the carton has a tag, it indicates its presence to the reader and every time the reader does a poll he will exactly know what is there and where it is. If somebody wants to find product x, you will know where it is available and if it is available where it is in a large scale. RFID lends itself into a lot of business applications.

Enumerate the technology of RFID.

RFID uses radio frequency to indicate its availability. It is different from other technologies in the past such as infrared. Infrared technology would not work so well inside a very cold or a very hot atmosphere. RFID uses defined frequencies, ultrared frequencies and very high frequency ranges. There are three things involved in the RFID process and the end result is a tag, which is a small object that is placed on a box. The tags are read by RFID readers which are devices that have specific geographic context. Finally there are RFID writers which produce these tags.

From our perspective, we provide the software infrastructure necessary to make an RFID implementation. We provide the technology infrastructure that will take care of backend applications like a facility and extend it onto the devices that are there and make the business project work and vice versa. This technology allows extension of logic all the way down to the devices. ProPath (a leader in pathology services) is using our technology for the analysis of test specimens in their labs. The specimens are put through a specific process in testing which includes subjecting them to different temperatures and atmospheric conditions. They use our technology to track each specimen as it moves through each phase of the testing process.

How effective is RFID in checking counterfeiting? How much counterfeiting can technology control?

Counterfeiting comes in when one carton of genuine substance is added to or replaced by one carton of counterfeit substance. If the pharma company extends RFID readers to super-stockist, sub-stockist or distributor, they will be able to inscribe everything in the shipment and will be able to provide the tally of the stock. They don't have to write stuff down, the system is already there and they have to critically move the cartons to the spot, which they will have to do any which ways. We have the mathematics of the product to be distributed all the way down to the chemist. By having something which is tracked and automated; anybody who is anywhere in the world in the distribution chain is accountable of saying—I am not responsible for counterfeiting.

Pharma distribution is traditional. Do you think they will have the mentality to be open to technology and the costs that arise from it?

Whether they like it or not, technology is something that they will have to adopt just because of the volume of the business that they are having and the kind of timing that they have to maintain.

From a pharma specific perspective, the desire for them to utilise technology is going to be counterbalanced by the amount of effort they will have to put in themselves. I think the change in terms of what they have to do is minimum and the advantages that they get are far more than that.

The cost of RFID is a significant minority of what companies would invest in IT otherwise. If you put the RFID cost with the manufacturing cost, cost of RFID is going to be a very small percentage of the manufacturing cost itself. But one can look at RFID beyond counterfeiting also. There is significant meaning that RFID provides to the supply chain component.