Pro-X Seeks RFID for Internal Benefits
RFID Journal -March 8, 2006

Pro-X Pharmaceuticals, a maker of nutritional supplements, is deploying RFID to help manage production of its products and track inventory.

Nutritional supplement producer Pro-X Pharmaceuticals is deploying radio frequency identification to help track its inventory and manage production of its products. The company hopes that by deploying RFID technology to increase visibility into its manufacturing and inventory processes, it will be able to respond better to fluctuations in demand.

"The media really drives our demand," says Ben Hosseinzadeh, chief operating officer of Roex, which owns Pro-X Pharmaceuticals. Pro-X is an independent contract manufacturer that produces Roex-brand nutritional supplements and also provides manufacturing and packaging services for other companies marketing nutritional supplements. News reports related to bird flu, for example, cause spikes in demand for natural immunity boosters. However, reports that raise questions about the safety or effectiveness of any single supplement or ingredient used in supplements could quickly curtail demand, so Pro-X needs to be able to scale its production schedules up and down quickly to maintain optimal inventory counts.

The products the company makes are aimed at preventing and decreasing, through natural ingredients, health problems primarily associated with aging and disease. Despite its name, Pro-X Pharmaceuticals does not manufacture pharmaceuticals—though it plans to do so in the future—and because its products are nutritional supplements, they are not subject to FDA approval or oversight. Roex and Pro-X are based in Irvine, Calif.

Roex has chosen RFID systems integrator ODIN Technologies to help the company design and deploy RFID for work-in-progress manufacturing control and inventory tracking. The company is using passive, ultrahigh frequency EPC Gen 2 tags and readers and middleware provided by Shipcom Wireless.

About a year and a half ago, at the direction of Roex founder and president Rod Burreson, Hosseinzadeh started investigating RFID as a possible means of improving Pro-X's product tracking, work-in-progress manufacturing processes and product quality. Hosseinzadeh notes that Burreson encourages the use of new technology to improve operations and quality control throughout Pro-X and Roex. The RFID deployment is not motivated in any way by retailer mandates or pressure from Pro-X's distribution network. Roex sells its products directly to customers through a mail-order system. Pro-X also makes products for 232 retailers in the United States, none of which are currently using RFID for product tracking.

The designing phase of its RFID system is complete, Hosseinzadeh says. "The next step is deployment, starting in early April," he explains. "We are going into this in phases, making sure everything works and seeing what we can gain and learn at each step. It's an ongoing process."

Pro-X will add Gen 2 smart labels to bulk containers of ingredients used to make its products. At the Pro-X manufacturing facility, workers will apply smart labels to the containers of raw materials, which generally arrive in corrugated cardboard drums ranging from 5 to 45 gallons in volume. The tags will be encoded, using a handheld interrogator, with unique IDs associated with a lot number, and any expiration dates linked to the ingredients. Pro-X also performs quality tests on the ingredients it receives, to certify that they are safe and pure. The results of these tests will also be associated with the IDs. Before production of a particular item begins, the necessary tagged containers will be gathered and interrogated, and the tag data will be aggregated in a database.

"This starts to form a pedigree because you know the lot ingredients that go into each batch," says Bret Kinsella, ODIN's chief operating officer. This production record will be associated with the bulk quantities of finished products, which will be placed in large tagged barrels. Encoded to each barrel's tag will be an ID correlating with the batch data, so the finished product can be linked to the raw materials used to make it. Once each batch of finished supplement product is packaged into individual bottles for retail sale, those bottles will be packed in cases to which RFID smart labels will also be affixed. The tags will let Pro-X use interrogators in a number of different form factors, including handheld, fixed and fork-lifted mounted devices, to track each case as it enters the inventory storage area and as it is picked to fulfill orders.

Pro-X believes that in addition to improving work-in-progress tracking and inventory management, RFID will help it manage any product recalls it might have in the future. The company plans to install an RFID infrastructure in its distribution facilities, for instance, enabling it to use the smart labels to receive the tagged cases of its products into inventory, to fulfill orders and to automate the identification and collection of products that might be involved in a recall.

"RFID will give more granularity in terms of where things are in production," says Hosseinzadeh. "We'll be able to see what we have in production and on the shelf at any time." He adds that using RFID should lead to benefits for Pro-X's retailer customers because Pro-X will have more visibility into exactly where in the production process its customers' orders are at any one time.

Pro-X has also recently installed Great Plains, an enterprise resource-planning platform from Microsoft. The company is using the platform to manage its accounting, inventory and manufacturing processes. "When we approached ODIN, we made clear that whatever we do with RFID, it has to integrate with Great Plains," says Hosseinzadeh. Shipcom's background in RFID data integration with Great Plains was one of the major reasons ODIN decided to partner with Shipcom on the Pro-X deployment, says Kinsella. By pulling the tag data associated with the raw materials, finished products and orders into the Great Plains applications, Shipcom will integrate the RFID system with Pro-X's back-end systems.