Thanks to Sean A. Murphy, writing for Logistics Management, you can get an insider’s view of the current thinking at Pfizer in the United States in terms of product tracking and authentication. In an item entitled, “Logistics technology: Pfizer places an accent on security,” Mr. Murphy interviews Peggy Staver, director of product integrity for Pfizer’s U.S. Trade Group and a 27-year pharmaceutical industry veteran.

It’s a long interview, but it is a worthwhile read if you’re interested in how and why serialization takes time, why standards are needed, and whether or not Pfizer is doing this primarily for a return on investment (ROI) or for patient safety and product integrity at any cost. But speaking of standards, here’s what Ms. Staver says when asked this question: When you say standards, are you talking about your company specifically, the pharmaceutical industry, or industrial standards in general?

I’m referring to global standards, because many of the manufacturers who are selling products in the U.S. have plants around the world where product is manufactured. Serialization is being implemented not only for the U.S. market but for other world markets; therefore there’s a need for a standard way in which we serialize our product, and also standards around things such as frequencies for the RFID tags, and standards around how we will generate pedigrees and populate those pedigrees and exchange serialized information. So the standards area is a very broad one and there’s a great deal of work currently going on within the GS1 standards-setting organization. They were the group that was initially involved with the linear bar code standards and they are now working to help industry establish the standards necessary to support the use of RFID and 2D bar codes.