Costs of authentic pharmaceuticals: research on qualitative and quantitative aspects of enabling anti-counterfeiting in RFID-aided supply chains

The pharmaceutical industry suffers from steadily increasing counterfeit rates. RFID technology is named as a foundation for an integer and counterfeit-resistant pharmaceutical supply chain. A transformation toward an RFID-aided supply chain involves both technical and business adaptions. We share technical insights of our proposed architecture for storing and searching pharmaceutical RFID event data. From the business perspective, we discuss the viability of RFID-based anti-counterfeiting with respect to its monetary impacts. We define qualitative requirements for software components developed for RFID and provide a quantitative analysis of operational costs for a dedicated service provider for anti-counterfeiting. Its implementation and amortization is discussed for different operating setups to enable access to RFID technology for all participants of pharmaceutical the supply chain