tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28450497.post-78285453845357232192007-04-20T15:34:00.000-04:002007-04-20T15:34:00.000-04:00Adam, calling the HII report "bad news" for RFID makes you a glass-half-empty kinda guy. Let me explain: your own citation translates into 31% doing something with RFID. I think that that's an encouragingly high figure. <BR/><BR/>The next issue of Pharmaceutical Commerce (out in about 10 days) will have a report that includes some of the HII conclusions, as well as reporting from RFID World. One "development" of sorts is that there appears to be a consensus that the January 2009 California deadline is "real"--meaning that industry will have to offer a substantive program by that date. Given how IT/technology projects go, January 2009 is not that far off. <BR/><BR/>Your comments about the CA regs, RFID and e-pedigree are sort of right, in my view, but there's another element to this. The conflict is not between RFID and e-pedigree, but rather pedigree documentation (whether electronic or paper-based) and a for-real track-and-trace system. Pedigree is mostly a system that trails a product through the supply chain, so that a product and its records arrive at a destination more or less together. Track-and-trace is mostly a database that allows both backward looking views (to produce a pedigree) and forward-looking views to, for example, do better forecasting, inventory management or contract monitoring. That flexibility is where the business value will come from. Pedigree documentation is a negative-value regulatory burden (but necessary); track-and-trace has potential to be a postive-value business practice (while complying with pedigree requirements).<BR/><BR/>The kicker to all this is that RFID, in its fullest flowering, makes track-and-trace easier to do. You're right--neither pedigree (nor track-and-trace) necessarily depend on RFID. But RFID makes track-and-trace easier to perform.<BR/><BR/>I recommend the HII report to anyone in the pharma industry who's trying to get a meaningful assessment of what's going on; it presents the business case without the RFID hype coming from many other directions. <BR/><BR/>See you at TRAX!<BR/>--Nick Basta, Pharmaceutical CommerceAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com