Potential Impact of RFID-Based Tracing Systems on the Integrity of Pharmaceutical Products

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is going to play a crucial role as auto-identification technology in a wide range of applications such as healthcare, logistics, supply chain management, ticketing, et cetera. The use of electromagnetic waves to identify, trace, and track people or goods allows solving many problems related to auto-identification devices based on optical reading (i.e. bar code). Currently, high interest is concentrated on the use of Radio Frequency (RF) solutions in healthcare and pharmaceutical supply chain, in order to improve drugs flow transparency and patients’ safety. Unfortunately, there is a possibility that drug interaction with electromagnetic fields (EMFs) generated by RF devices, such as RFID readers, deteriorate the potency of bioactive compounds. This chapter proposes an experimental multidisciplinary approach to investigate potential alterations induced by EMFs on drug molecular structure and performance. To show the versatility of this approach, some experimental results obtained on two biological pharmaceuticals (peptide hormone-based) are discussed.

Moving toward a Global Supply Chain Operations and the Impact on International Competition

As the domestic businesses expand, many are making the choice to use foreign products, labor, and services to aid in their production. Global supply chains are minimizing the costs of the production process but are also creating vulnerabilities to home countries. As the global economy changes, the competitiveness between countries grows. Competitiveness can affect everything from a country’s economy to how a firm conducts international business. Addressing the need to find a method to increase the United States competitiveness in the world economy by improving the use of global supply chains would help to make domestic firms more successful in the global economy. Studying how companies position themselves abroad is important to providing insight into how to become more competitive. Worldwide companies are diversifying by moving more of their supply chain to international locations. This is providing them with many benefits such as better markets for products, lower costs, and more advanced technologies. As a result, the competitive strategy of companies is to increase production and decrease costs through the most efficient global supply chain. Maximizing the potential of domestic firms’ global supply chains is one of the most effective ways to increase U.S. competitiveness. If more big businesses in the United States are willing to participate on the global level, then the US will be able to improve their competitiveness.

Semiotic Evaluation of Product Ontologies

Product-related information can be integrated with the help of a product ontology, which can provide consensual definitions of concepts and inter-relationships relevant in a product domain of interest. A product ontology is either given by a third party or results from ontology engineering. In both cases, the problem is how to assess its quality, and then select the “right” ontology. This chapter: (1) proposes a metrics suite for product ontology evaluation based on semiotic theory, and (2) demonstrates the feasibility and usefulness of the metrics suite using a supply chain model. The contribution of this research is the comprehensive metrics suite that takes into account the various quality dimensions of product ontology.

Military Involvement in Humanitarian Supply Chains

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the multitude of activities that military logisticians can provide throughout the various stages in relief supply chains. Most military joint doctrine identifies humanitarian assistance (HA) as one of the “Military Operations Other Than War” (MOOTW) that military personnel are trained to undertake. Part of this HA involves contributing to humanitarian supply chains and logistics management. The supply chain management processes, physical flows, as well as associated information and financial systems form part of the military contributions that add to other aid in the relief supply chain. The main roles of the military to relief supply chains include security and protection, distribution, and engineering. Examples of these key contributions will be provided in this chapter.

Social CRM

This chapter provides an overview of social customer relationship management (CRM) and explores the Web-based platforms that provide social CRM solution in software as a service (SaaS) model as well as the applications and tools that complement traditional CRM systems. Based on a review of current practices, the chapter also outlines the potential benefits social CRM provides to organizations in their sales, service, and marketing efforts. Furthermore, while the Web and its new breed of technologies and applications open new opportunities for businesses, these technologies also pose several new challenges for organizations in implementation, integration, data security, and consumer privacy, among others. In addition, these technologies can be exploited in a negative way to propagate misinformation against businesses and their reputations. In view of this, this chapter also examines ethical and legal challenges businesses could face in embracing social media technologies at the core of their customer management processes and systems.

Applying Fuzzy Logic and Fuzzy Methods to Marketing

Marketing deals with identifying and meeting the needs of customers. It is therefore both an art and a science. To bridge the gap between art and science, soft computing, or computing with words, could be an option. This chapter introduces fundamental concepts such as fuzzy sets, fuzzy logic, and computing with linguistic variables and terms. This set of fuzzy methods can be applied in marketing and customer relationship management. In the conclusion, future research directions are given for applying fuzzy logic to marketing and customer relationship management.

Supply Chain Knowledge Integration in Emerging Economies

Firms in developed economies have been purchasing from firms in emerging economies for years, but they typically purchase low value, low margin items. Opportunities have arisen for emerging economy manufacturers to supply higher value products and services to firms in developed economies. In today’s global, knowledge based economy, suppliers must have cutting edge knowledge, and they must constantly upgrade their knowledge to maintain a competitive advantage. When supplying high-value products, complex knowledge based interactions between the buyer and supplier are necessary. A conceptual model is developed in this chapter, proposing that if suppliers in emerging economies are committed to long term relationships with developed economy customers, they can increase the level of knowledge integration in the relationship, and in turn, improve performance. The primary contribution of this chapter is to show that firms in emerging economies can achieve sales growth by becoming critical links in today’s global, knowledge based supply chains.

A Multi-Criteria Intuitionistic Fuzzy Group Decision Making Method for Supplier Selection with VIKOR Method

Supplier selection, the process of finding the right suppliers who are able to provide the buyer with the right quality products and/or services at the right price, at the right time and in the right quantities, is one of the most critical activities for establishing an effective supply chain, and is typically a multi-criteria group decision problem. In many practical situations, there usually exists incomplete and uncertain information, and the decision makers cannot easily express their judgments on the candidates with exact and crisp values. Therefore, in this paper an extended VIKOR method for group decision making with intuitionistic fuzzy numbers is proposed to solve the supplier selection problem under incomplete and uncertain information environment. In other researches in this area, the weights of each decision makers and in many of them the weights of criteria are pre-determined, but these weights have been calculated in this paper by using the decision matrix of each decision maker. Also, normalized Hamming distance is proposed to calculate the distance between intuitionistic fuzzy numbers. Finally, a numerical example for supplier selection is given to clarify the main results developed in this paper.

Multidimensional Analysis of Supply Chain Environmental Performance

Monitoring the environmental performance of a product is recognized to be increasingly important. The most common method of measuring the environmental performance is the international standards of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Typically, measuring is based on estimations and average values at product category level. In this chapter, the authors present a framework for measuring environmental impact at the item level. Using Traceability Graph, emissions and resources can be monitored from the data management perspective. The model can be mapped to any precision level of physical tracing. At the most precise level, even a single physical object and its components can be analyzed. This, of course, demands that the related objects and their components are identified and mapped to the database. From the opposite perspective, the authors’ model also supports rough level analysis of products and their histories. In terms of the Traceability Cube, multidimensional analysis can be applied for traceability data.

Supply Chain Disruptions and Best-Practice Mitigation Strategies

This paper reviews the supply chain management literature to summarize best-practice guidelines for mitigating supply problems. Very few studies in the extant literature focused on matching a strategy for both the supply and demand perspective. Case studies of supply chain management have traditionally focused on single companies, and especially on successful organizations rather than on the demand-supply-chain relationships (which involve at least two companies). Therefore, this study considers the experiences of the author, and researchers several well-known profitable fortune 1000 supply chain companies, to determine which supply chain mitigation strategies work best in complex situations.