Improving the Reliability and Security of Global Cold Chain Logistics
from excessive freezing or vibration. In the
end, the damaged vial will be found, but the
responsible party will be unknown.
continuously for us to have true confidence
in the status of the cold chain.
As with inspection devices, tamper-resistant
IoT devices can monitor environmental
parameters of the cold chain and log data
using unforgeable M2M communication.
The ultimate goal for root-cause detection is
to predict failure, repair equipment, improve
processes and remediate the cold chain
before assets have been damaged. 10
Authenticity
As the value of assets increases, the
temptation for forgery and dilution
increases. Within food supply logistics,
saffron stands as a good example of risk and
mitigation. Minimally invasive inspection
methods were created that correlate
spectroscopy and purity. 9 Additionally, the
specific process for inspection was
standardized as ISO 3632. Similar strategies
should be adopted to create standardized
inspection for common pharmaceutical
asset types that require a cold chain.
Recall and Replacement
All participants in a supply chain agree to
some manner of agreement regarding
replacement of assets or repayment for
damages. Identifying the responsible party
often becomes a lengthy and messy legal
exercise. For precaution, each party should
be recalling any tainted or possibly tainted
assets. Without clear identification of the
root cause of damage, recalls will be broader
and costlier than necessary and,
undoubtedly, damaged vaccines will be
administered to patients before the issue is
identified.
Standards alone do not provide a guarantee
of authenticity and purity. Tamper resistant
IoT devices can be used for the inspection
themselves, with the results written through
machine-to-machine (M2M) communication
to blockchain or other distributed database
technology.
Root Cause for Damage
IoT provides a great hope for faster
identification of damaged pharmaceuticals,
clear traceability to lot numbers, and hence
much more focused and effective recalls.
While vaccines are more generally
administered, there are other medically
related assets that are extremely costly to
replace. An organ en route for a transplant
Each handoff between different parties
within the cold chain creates a risk for false
negatives, whereby one party takes over
custody of the asset with the assumption
that the asset is undamaged. These false
negatives further delay the identification of
the root cause. Data must be recorded
9
Khilare, V., Tiknaik, A., Prakash, B., Ughade, B., Korhale, G., Nalage, D., Ahmed, N., Khedkar, C. and Khedkar, G. (2019).
Multiple tests on saffron find new adulterant materials and reveal that Ist grade saffron is rare in the market. Food Chemistry,
272, pp.635-642.
10
Anderson, R., Lloyd, J. and Newland, S. (2012). Software for national level vaccine cold chain management. Proceedings of the
Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development - ICTD '12.
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