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Introduction
In the high-selling pharma market (Institute for Healthcare Informatics, 2012), a combination of product counterfeiting, errors in the production and distribution of temperature-sensitive drugs, the theft of expensive products, and faulty drugs resulting from incorrect ingredients lead to multi-billion-dollar revenue losses throughout the world and constitute a serious threat to public health. Against this background, various guidelines support the actors of pharmaceutical supply chains (PSCs) to ensure correct drug handling (EU, 2013; WHO, 2014). The latest European Union guideline for the good distribution practice (GDP) of medical products for human use has been effective since September 2013 and challenges the actors to ensure and prove correct drug handling throughout the entire PSC (Spiggelkötter, 2013). Consequently, actors in PSCs are forced to enhance supply chain visibility (SCV).
SCV can be defined as “the extent to which actors within a supply chain have access to or share information which they consider as key or useful to their operations and which they consider will be of mutual benefit” (Barratt and Oke, 2007, p. 1218). Such visibility helps actors to achieve an enhanced overview of material flows within complex supply chains (Christopher and Lee, 2004; Christopher and Towill, 2001). As Barratt and Oke (2007) mentioned, SCV results from information being shared between supply chain actors (see also Christopher and Lee, 2004) and can have a positive effect on supply chain management (Delen et al., 2007; Jonsson and Mattsson, 2013; Lumsden and Mirzabeiki, 2008). However, SCV and information sharing require the adoption of monitoring solutions based on automatic identification (Auto-ID) technologies (Angeles, 2005; Kärkkäinen and Holmström, 2002; Lee and Özer, 2007), which enable information gathering, sharing (Attaran, 2007; Spekman and Sweeney, 2006) and an overview of material flows (Holmström et al., 2010; McFarlane and Sheffi, 2003).
Against this background, we argue that the functional capabilities of current technologies for practical monitoring solutions, such as barcodes, data matrix codes and data loggers, are insufficient to enhance the pharmaceutical SCV and to ensure and prove that drug handling satisfies the GDP guideline. To support this assertion, we cite other studies on Auto-ID technologies with advanced functional capabilities that are promising in relation to enhancing SCV (Prockl and Pflaum, 2012; Sanchez Lopez et al., 2011; Zheng and Jamalipour, 2009)....