Problem statement

Establishing trust between trading partners and compliance with the US Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA).

Approach

The team created and evaluated various simulated supply chain scenarios (ReferenceModels) that helped to visualize the results.

Technical details

A simulated environment was created that allowed the team to test certain hypotheses. The results of the simulations and the data generated are known as ReferenceModels. Below are the three ReferenceModels:

• ReferenceModel 1: Stocks the complete Transaction Information (TI) in a shared blockchain platform for retrieval. Also, transact Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) events straight between trading partners to connect the contents of shipments and logistics units.
• ReferenceModel 2: Stocks address to trading partner portals/repositories of Transaction Information (TI) for recovery in an industry-shared blockchain platform. Also, transact EPCIS events staright between trading partners to communicate the contents of shipments and logistics units.
• ReferenceModel 3: Send DSCSA Transaction Information (TI) to blockchain platform distributed applications (DApps) that assess the data and store present “states” of the individual Product identifier. An enlarges version comprises of shipment hierarchy and may reduce the need to transact EPCIS events directly between trading partners.

As supply chain stakeholders are currently working through serialization of drug products, there are not enough of them to fully pilot any of the ReferenceModel designs. The next steps are to move from a simulated environment to test environments where the technology can be explored using test or simulated data. Once the stakeholders begin to converge on single model and can engage in connecting internal systems to a test environment, full pilots and implementations will follow.