Cold Chain Management using RFID-tagged Pallets

[oliver_nuernberg]

Hi,

I am currently looking into how we can manage the cold chain within a company using the various technologies provided by SAP. This product has a certain allowed maximum temperature (e.g. 0°C) and a maximum Time-off-Temperature (e.g. 90 min.). So every time the product on the pallet exceeds the maximum allowed temperature the timer continues ticking and cululates the time the product on this particular pallet has been outside the allowed range. If the maximum time-off-temperature is exceeded this pallet if the product is off spec. Typcially the temperate is not really measured for the pallet but only the location of the pallet is tracked, so whether is the pallet is in or out of the cooled area. The movement out of and back into the cooled area is tracked via an RFID-Tag on the pallet and a reader at the gate.

Did anybody have a similar situation? Any experience with EM/AII/OER in this context? Did anybody already define such a timer as an attribute of an event handler?

Thanks.

Oliver

[kevin_wilson2]

Oliver,

I did a POC in just this area for a large Pharma company in Europe in December. I used SAP Event Management functionality to capture information from the production line all the way through storage, transportation and ultimate delivery. The company was able to provide the start and end events for each time a product / batch combination left a 2-8 degC area (cold room) so we could measure the time outside the cold range. The only challenge was transportation of the finished goods but they have a good plan in place with that with temperature monitors inserted in to the truck and in some cases in the box and outside the box itself. On receipt of the goods these monitor have their data loaded and passed through to EM where it adds up the "outside of 2-8" durations and registers it against that material / batch Event Handler. At the end of the day I was able to show from the delivery all the way back to the original drug product components time outside 2-8 degC. In fact we could show any adherence or exception against the budgeted hours for that product.

Didn't use OER because the product was not being managed at a serialized item level at the time. They were just managing at the batch level and SAP EM (which is the base of OER anyway) could handle the requirement 100%.

For more details we will be discussing this and other Pharma / serialization topics at out 1 day seminar on Serialized Track and Trace - See the details at http://qdatausa.wordpress.com/about/serialization/

Thanks

Kevin

SAP Extended Supply Chain Solutions Engineer

[former_member190756]

Hello Oliver,

in SAP OER is already a Cold Chained scenario available:

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_aii710/helpdata/en/06/2020e7da9a4e32beb01f5524f3da70/frameset.htm

It should be possible to adapt this scenario to your use case.

Best regards,

Steffen

[oliver_nuernberg]

Hi Steffen,

thanks. I am aware of this scenario. The problem is that this scenario "only" provides a qualitative status, i.e. the cold chain was OK or not OK. In our case we need to somehow calculate the remaining time-off-temperature that the dedicated pallet of the product has remaining. The documented scenario is mainly used for external cold-chain tracking, i.e. after the product was shipped.

Oliver

[former_member190756]

Hello Oliver,

as you can create parameters and activities in EM it should be not much effort to adapt the scenario to your needs.

The Time-off-Temperature could be stored in a new Parameter and the calculation could be done with an activity. With a new status you could indicate the "off spec" when the 90 minutes are exceeded.

Best regards,

Steffen