1.       Create a vision:  It’s essential to clearly demonstrate how this partnership or contract will benefit the other party. You’ve got to be in their world, creating a vision for them on what this does for them.

2.      Don’t believe you have all the power and avoid using terminology like “take it or leave it”: Negotiations are done in an entirely emotional arena. The human mind functions in the emotional until it makes a decision. People who are rough or aggressive or pushy often create an emotional reaction that they’re never going to be able to overcome.

3.      Know what you want to get out of the deal and make sure it’s achievable: Make sure that you know what you want, that’s a critical piece to the puzzle.

4.      Don’t compromise beforehand: Never ever go into a meeting with a fallback position. That’s the worst thing that you can do.

5.      Invest in a skill: Don’t rely only on your natural because negotiation really is a science. Read a book, sign up for a course and look at each negotiation experience as an opportunity to learn and improve.

1.       Forget what you sell:  When you first meet a prospect, start thinking of questions that will uncover his hot buttons. What does that person do, and does he have goals for the next year or three years? What are his top three priorities or objectives? What challenges and changes does he face in his industry? How can you help him generate more business? Once you focus on the customer, it becomes easier to think of ways your product or service can fit into their overall goals. If you realize right away that it’s not a good fit, you can walk away and work on other, more qualified prospects.

2.      Go beyond the customer’s general business needs:  There are instances wherein some business owners tend to do something helpful for the prospect that had nothing to do with their business. Maybe they helped them get one of their kids an internship at a client’s business, or perhaps they referred them to a great builder because they were listening when the customer mentioned she was adding on to her house. This breaks down barriers and opens customers up to looking to you as a resource. That’s when good things start to happen.

3.      Maintain your passion for learning about the people you serve:  How well do you know your prospects and customers? How much more business could you get if you spent more time uncovering their inner workings? When I take a tour of a customer’s business, I interview people in various departments and research who their customers are; this always pays off. Your ability to serve is enhanced by knowledge. When you ask a customer for resources in their organization that you can use to understand the bigger picture, your relationship and the trust with your customer improves, you’re much more aware of their needs and how best to serve them, and the results you bring them will provide you with repeat business and referrals.

Here’s what you need to keep in mind when you set a price.

Input all costs

One of the first things to do is get the basic costs right.

• Weigh or portion the raw materials to get an accurate picture of your costs.
• Don’t forget to consider items like electricity, gas, labor, and other items needed to make the product.
• Monitor how much time it takes to produce your product so that you can compute labor costs.
• Factor in other operating costs like marketing expenses.

Mark-up your product

Once you have done the costing, ask yourself the amount of profit that you want to make. If you want to earn $10.00 per product, put that amount on top of your costs to get your selling price.

Market pricing

While the markup should be satisfactory to you, you must also take into consideration the price that your market can take to ensure that they will still buy your product. Your price must be competitive. If two or three of you sell the same product, either you price it the same or lower as long as your costs are covered.

Too high a price may put you out of market range, and too low a price may prompt possible clients to wonder about the quality.  Finding that happy middle ground assures you that clients can still afford to buy your product while covering your costs.

flickr image by Goddard Photo and Video Blog

It’s common knowledge that a picture is worth a thousand words.  If that’s true, imagine how much more material you can incorporate into a 30-minute training presentation if visuals are added. 

According to two studies sponsored by 3M Company, one by Wharton School’s Applied Research Center and the other by University of Minnesota’s Management Information System Research Center, on the impact of projected and computer generated visual aids on presentations and business meetings.  Both studies give strong scientific support to the widely accepted perception that visual aids do indeed increase the effectiveness of presentations. 

According to the University of Minnesota study, when visuals are added to an oral presentation, retention is increased by about 10 percent and visuals can make a presentation up to 43 percent more persuasive.

Equally important, the studies show that a trainer who is just an average presenter can become a much better presenter by using strong visual support.  In fact, speakers who use visuals are perceived as better prepared, more persuasive, more credible, and more interesting.

With such strong scientific support, it makes sense to use visuals in presentations and to take the time to learn to use them well.

When to use visuals

Because people think in graphic images and respond to strong graphic presentations, visuals work.  That is why information, especially those with masses of figures, should be put in visual form whenever possible.  But to be effective the graphics must be designed to enhance the presentation and give it impact.  They must be attractive, easy to read, and clear in the statements they make.

Following are some ideas on the best uses of visuals:

• To open the presentation. Use an arresting title or image to get the group’s attention.
• To channel thinking.  Select visuals that guide the group’s thinking to predetermined conclusions.
• To emphasize key points—not every sentence.
• To present statistical data in understandable ways.  Numbers can be meaningless when plainly presented orally.  Depicted on a graph, they take on meaning.
• To make comparisons
• To show relationships
• To explain new concepts.  Pictures and diagrams can be helpful when explaining details
• To show items too big or too small to display at a meeting.  For example, you could use a photograph to show an oil tanker or a microscopic material.

flickr photo by Fletcher Prince

PR or Public relations is about shaping and projecting an image as a key element in the drive for success. Top executives now consider a good image as a basic resource in the same way that they view finance or people.  As the interaction between the government, industry, the environment, and the public becomes extremely complex, Public Relations has become an inevitable component of corporate affairs.

Public Relations is the corporation communicating with its various publics with the end in view of winning public understanding, acceptance, and support.  Question:  What can good public relations do for a bad company?  Answer: Run it out of business quicker. Why is this so? Because PR is not only about form, of media mileage, and of cosmetics.  It is a public recognition of a substantive performance.  In fact PR can very well mean Performance Recognition.

The Role of Corporate Communication

Management analysts estimate that managers spend from 50 to 90 percent of their time communicating.  Each communication activity, of course, carries with it specific objectives which relate to any of the following:

1.  Corporate Philosophy and Ideology

• Evolve corporate philosophy and ideology.
• Enable officers/ employees to understand, appreciate and express corporate philosophy/ ideology.
• Enable officers/ employees to define and share corporate vision.
• Enable officers/ employees to define their roles in the organization.

2.  Corporate Image

• Update on range of company activities.
• Update on company performance (i.e., growth rat, export performance, financial capability).
• Define future company directions (long-range and short-range plans).

3.  Marketing Tool

• Create consumer awareness and acceptance of company products/ services.
• Generate sales.

4.  Productivity and Profitability

• Create productivity awareness and quality consciousness.
• Increase employee’s morale
• Provide opportunity for professional development (skills upgrading, value formation, etc.)
• Provide update on recent company policies, rules, and regulations.

5.  Employee Relations and Professional Development

• Enhance camaraderie between and among employees and officers.
• Update on staff transitions (i.e., appointment, promotions, scholarships)
• Provide occasion for expression of creative talents.
• Develop critical thinking (awareness), among employees/ staff on national/ local issues.

flickr photo by sympra

6.  Industrial Harmony and Peace

• Provide a forum for dialogue between labor and management sectors.
• Identify (potential) conflict situations and appropriate solutions.
• Create employee/ union support on specific issues.
• Provide opportunity for consensus-building on specific issues.
• Provide channel by which employees can give specific recommendations to management.

7.  Social Responsibility and Public Image

• Generate public awareness/ support for specific company activities/ projects.
• Create awareness and support for community-oriented projects sponsored by the company.
• Enhance community relations
• Develop social awareness of readers

flickr photo by rossgram

8.  Government Relations

• Express company stance on government policies and programs (especially those affecting the business)
• Promote government-private dialogue on vital economic and industry issues, programs, and projects.

PLR High Priced Products provide you with a wide selection of options so that you can grow your online presence, but are they really worth it?

Let us look at the Advantages:

With PLR Big Ticketed Goods you pay for an instant “business in a box” product. This situation requires very little on your part to set up the item, also in addition to this, these types of expensively priced programs commonly include a web site, customised sales webpages and graphic image samples.

You receive various software packages that you could resell right away straight after setting up your payment processor. All that remains is for you to publicize your product.

For those who have a pre-existing client-list centered on your niche products and services, your financial cost on the PLR items can be viewed as an investment, which is where you’ll be able to promptly create substantial gains.

Additionally, with PLR articles and other content, you generally possess the right to utilise and repackage the subject material in just about any manner that you can – with regards to the rights and limits that that are included with the package when you purchase.

This in turn provides you with plenty of flexibility when delivering your products or services to end users. As an illustration, perhaps you can brand the products or services together with your own (or affiliates) brand and web site links. Although you are unable to state copyright to the product, by repackaging it with additional PLR software packages, you may manage to develop a completely brand new product with a ıncreased perceived worth.

Let us look at the Disadvantages:

Whilst you purchased these goodies, with the right to do anything with them along with the subject material, you do not own the copyright. Even if you find yourself tempted to place your label on the item, you are unable to copyright it if you don’t carry out significant variations to the product itself, so that it becomes quite unlike the original products or services.

Another issue that is advisable to consider, is that a number of other promoters will likely own identical Private Label Rights to the same Big Ticket Products. Although, realistically, this adds up to minimal competition.

There is also likely to be limits on the sale and use of the products. These are in most cases created to protect the long-term worth of the product within the industry. Although this can restrict your marketing efforts, additionally, it puts a stop to too many other marketers from introducing too much competition, and lowering the overall value of the item on the online market-place.

While these PLR items are being introduced into the marketplace, some marketers may choose to invest in the Master Resell Privilegesof the products, so you will end up fighting with a greater amount of advertisers than the original “limited” percentage who paid for the software packages with Private Label Rights.

Cover via Amazon

If natural selection functions the way Darwin postulated: with each animal’s feature evolving strictly for utilitarian reasons, how can one explain the waste one sees in nature all the time?  The peacock’s tail hinders movement; babblers spend precious time foraging food for other babblers; and, when it sees a wolf, a gazelle often does not run but spends precious time rising and thumping the ground with its hooves.  If the utilitarian selection Darwin posited was the only process at work, then it is hard to account for such wasteful behavior. 

Amotz and Avishag Zahavi explain this waste by postulating that this is how animals, including humans, show off their quality to potential mates, other members of their species, and predators alike.  Their basic hypothesis (which they prove by example after example in this beautifully written book) is that, in order to recreate, individuals must reliably signal their fitness.  A signal can only be reliable if the individual undertakes a handicap (accepts waste) such as not running away when seeing a predator approach.  And so they conclude that while efficiency is the rule of normal (or Darwin’s utilitarian selection), Darwin’s selection is complemented by the seemingly wasteful “signal selection”.  The two selections alternate with and complement each other.

They illustrate their hypothesis (called the handicap principle) through a series of examples from the natural world.  As a result, the world they paint is one in which everyone—from the single cell organism to humans is constantly communicating with everyone else.  Prey communicates with predators and predators with prey; potential mates display their quality (the peacock’s large tail mentioned earlier is a good example—and one that appears on the cover of the book); and rivals communicate by approaching one another—a human male for example, approaches his (potential) adversary with “a straight back, chest thrown out, shoulders back, chin up” (Zahavi, 17).  The Zahavis point out that by approaching a rival in this manner, the human male leaves himself open to attack as his most vulnerable body parts are clearly displayed to his adversary.  Nonetheless, they postulate that this posture evolved precisely because it is wasteful.  By showing off in this manner, the male is saying (in essence) I can beat you even if you do get a good punch in first.

And here I must come to my fair warning.  To the Zahavis, human beings are an integral part of the natural world and they observe them just as they observe babblers or monkeys.  The results will cause some to profoundly disagree for ideological reasons (as when the Zahavis postulate that “humans, like other animals, resolve most conflicts by communicating—which often includes the exchange of threats”) or for religious reasons as when the Zahavis use the people around them (which quite often are people in the Holy Land) to prove their point.  Indeed, at one point they cite the Bible as illustration.  So, if you are offended by the idea that humans are no better (but also no worse) than other animals or if you can’t accept the idea that humans not only evolved like other animals but that they are continuing to do so in the Holy Land, this book is probably not for you.

On the other hand, if you are interested in evolutionary biology, human and animal behavior and have been looking for a beautifully written and wonderfully illustrated book on the subject this is a great book.  The writing flows, the authors make their point by using compelling and convincing examples (rather than graphs and equations) and the illustrations are fantastic.  Best of all, after reading this book, you may see your own actions (or signals) in a brand new light. 

I simply cannot recommend this book enough. 

Related article: The Selfish Altruist

Now many clients (or bosses as a matter of fact) will be quite resilient to the idea. Trying to look at this from their perspective you can easily see where the problem lies. They spent money and time on a solution and now it seems you want to go and throw out all that has been done on some whim, or just for the joy of starting with a blank canvas. At least so it seems.

There are two things you need to explain about refactoring to get your point across. Obviously we start with an assumption here that it actually is the right thing to do, and not just a developers fondness for reinventing the wheel speaking…

The hairdresser analogy

Refactoring is a bit like getting a new hair cut. Where the hair style is your code and the hair is the concept you are trying to implement. Thus even though you might not leave a line of the old code the “hair” is still there to be worked on.

There may be many reasons why to refactor and the old code definitely has done it’s job at some point. Very often it is the lessons learned and limitations of the old implementation that do lead to the need for new code. It is a bit like cutting of too long hair to strengthen it and maybe for practical reasons.

This however only helps explain what refactoring is. It might not be the best example about why you need it, or why you haven’t gotten the hair-style right the first time round.

The garden analogy

I would like you to think about a garden. Let us imagine a small plot behind your lovely house. You can plant flowers, and bushes and trees, etc. and say you decided to cover up the back wall with a line of shrubs – they do cover the ugly wire fence nicely.

Now fast-forward 5 years later. It turns out you have an amazing deal on the plot of land just behind your own garden. You cannot build on it, but it would make your small green space a lot bigger. It’s an opportunity not to be missed. So you go ahead with that new feature, I mean extra land.

There is just a slight problem – your perfectly usable garden has shrubs just where the new plot meets your existing one. Oh, and they’re huge now – you can imagine what 5 years can do to a fast growing shrub… I mean you could just carve a whole and go through it but that is not an elegant solution.

Your original garden layout was not planned for the extension and there is nothing wrong in that. You do not have to bulldoze the whole of the old space, but obviously the shrubs have to go. If you plan carefully you might be able to replant them somewhere, however that is a whole different story.

The one legal prerequisite for taking out a life insurance policy on another individual is that the individual taking out the insurance has to have a monetary interest in that individual’s death–meaning he or she would gain or loose money because of it.  Ordinarily, that means that most insurance policies are written on oneself and close family members (spouses and children); however, partners in business as well as long-term domestic partners if they can also verify a “financial relationship” can take out insurance on each other, and employers can take out insurance on employees as well.

Most term policies are nonrenewable after a certain age specified in the policy (usually age 70).  Also, if you change employers and a term-life policy came with the job, you may need to take out another term-life policy.  The older an individual is when taking out any kind of life insurance, the higher his/her premiums will be.  Universal life allows the client to change the amount of the premium he/ she wishes to pay within a certain range while the insurance company invests the difference between how much a universal life and a whole life policy would ordinarily cost. 

A comparatively small whole life or universal life policy ($25,000 to $30,000) will pay for burial expenses with perhaps some money left over to pay for the estate’s expenses. Take out a term life insurance policy with riders for a spouse and children if attempting to guarantee that your children will have the money to go to college or if protecting a mortgage. Jumping juvenile policies that usually start as riders to term-life insurance can be converted to small whole life policies that are extremely affordable when a child reaches his or her mid-twenties, so whatever you do, if as a young adult, you have the chance to continue this jumping juvenile coverage, don’t let it lapse.  You can’t find a cheaper whole life policy anywhere.

Shop around for rates on line, but understand that if you request any information, a local agent will call. Indeed, even if you are only seeking burial insurance, for example, the often advertised Colonial Penn, a local agent will ask to set up an appointment. 

Now for a personal note: If you aren’t really interested, don’t agree to an appointment.  Agents usually pay a substantial amount of money for leads each month and also must visit at least five prospects each day, often traveling hundreds of miles, so a completely uninterested prospect or a prospect that fails to show for an appointment completely wastes the agent’s time and money.  Moreover, if you drop a policy within a year of taking it out, the agent will need to pay for the difference out of his or her earnings.  Consequently, high-pressure sales tactics on the agent’s part really don’t work in the long run, but the agent does want to make a sale on the first or second visit.

Many insurance companies advertise low-cost burial policies usually aimed at older adults who don’t have any life insurance.  Usually, these policies will pay for only a very low-cost funeral without any of the trimmings.  However, during the agent’s visit, he or she will usually offer an upgrade with better rates provided that the prospective client can pass on site medical questions backed by a physician’s current appraisal of the individual’s health.  The agent also must ask that the prospect sign a form allowing the insurance company’s underwriters access to his or her current medical records.  Unless a policy is very large, the prospect probably won’t be asked to submit to a medical physical.  Before deciding to take out a whole life policy, older prospects should check out pre-paid funeral plans in their area, so they will have a cost comparison.  It’s also perfectly acceptable to talk over the life insurance agent’s offer with adult children before signing the contract on the agent’s second visit.

During the agent’s interview with any prospective client, he or she will also quite possibly offer long-term care insurance and annuities.  The rates on long-term care insurance incidentally are lower the younger a policy holder is when he or she takes out a policy, so the 50s are an optimum age for buying relatively inexpensive long-term care insurance.  Most individuals who will end up using long-term care end up using it for two years or less.  When purchasing a long-term care policy, make sure that it provides for both home health care and for care in an institutional setting.  Long-term care policy rates incidentally can and do go up just like health insurance.

Now for some tips that really save consumers money:  If you smoke, stop.  Smoking substantially raises premiums.  Lose weight if your weight is more than the weight range suggested by actuary tables for your age, sex, and frame since being overweight also really raises premiums or is even a reason to deny coverage.  If you plan to take out a life insurance policy this year, loose weight gradually with your physician’s blessing (so this effort can be documented) because most underwriters look with disfavor upon too rapid a weight loss.  After you have purchased a policy if while still a smoker or over weight, notify your insurance company, and it will lower your rates.

Most insurance companies also offer discounts for paying policies yearly in a lump sum or for six or three months at a time.  They also deduct the policy automatically from a checking or savings account and will not issue a policy unless an individual agrees to pay for it this way.  However, many agents will be more than willing to go to a bank or credit union to help a prospective client set up a checking or savings account if necessary.

By the way, although I now teach, a few years ago, when I was going through a particularly rough time financially, I supported myself selling life insurance for two years. Many insurance agents in the United States either sell insurance on the side or else sell life insurance as a second career.  It takes a lot of training to sell life insurance, and agents also have to undergo continuing education every two years to renew a license within their state.  Contiuing education includes training in ethics and consumer education.  If you think that an agent is unethical, notify his or her company headquarters.  State boards of insurance have the power to fine agents or revoke their licenses.  Most insurance agents I have known want to do right by their clients.

From a strategic perspective, we increasingly live in what could be termed a “Google Earth” world. To draw upon this analogy, just think how much our lives have been transformed by the power of information. A decade or so ago, if we were looking for a specific address in an unfamiliar area, how would we find it? Well, it would most certainly be done in a low-tech manner, by asking for directions or stopping at a gas station or a convenience store to ask for help.

Five years ago, we began to use Map-Quest and – to a lesser extent – other web-based navigation tools. This made it possible to leave our homes with a print-out that had complete, turn-by-turn directions from any point A to any point B. We then began to see in-car navigation systems like On-Star come of age, providing us graphical directions and even voice prompts telling us what road to take and where to exit, turn, and stop. Today, we can sit at our desktop or view a laptop propped on the passenger seat to use Google Earth and view incredibly detailed photos from the sky of exactly what we will see on the ground, enabling us to zoom in on the exact parking space of the building at the address we are heading to. Thus, for anywhere we could physically wish to go on the planet – from Boise to Baghdad – we can now expect to have incredible visibility and real-time information. We expect – and demand – to be able to instantly find the proverbial “needle in the haystack” anywhere, anytime.

RFID and the Retail Supply Chain

The same is becoming true – and necessary – in today’s retail supply chains. With the global supply chains necessary to stock Target’s store shelves in Wichita Falls or Walgreen’s in Memphis stretching back to Hong Kong, Managua and other far-flung locales, major retailers must seek to have global business intelligence systems in place, managing movements of goods from manufacturer through shipment to their distribution center, to the stock room, to the store shelf through checkout. But bar codes present a crucial limitation: whereas they can only identify a class of items – a type of box of cereal for example – RFID can uniquely identify the specific box of that cereal that you are holding at the moment or the dozen on the store shelf in front of you. The promise of RFID in retail is to provide ROI through increased sales, increased inventory availability, reduced stock-outs and labor cost savings and the ultimate “retail nirvana” – still probably a decade or so away – where every item is tagged with RFID and “smart stores” promise interactive shelves and “roll through” checkouts. All this is made possible through the increased visibility that RFID brings and the imagination to use this data to better manage retail operations.

Take a simple example – in-store promotions. Let’s say that for the Super Bowl, a major retailer and a major snack food supplier are cooperating on a promotion for tortilla chips and salsa. For the big game, the supplier had stocked the products in four different locations in the store – the snack food aisle, the middle of a major traffic aisle, a special display set-up on the adult beverage aisle, and point-of-purchase displays in the checkout aisles. In today’s present environment, with bags of chips and jars of hot sauce being identified through bar codes, while it would be possible to gauge the overall effectiveness of the campaign (i.e., sales were up X% over last year at the same time and Y% over a “normal” weekend), it would be impossible to really assess the true, operational-level results of the Super Bowl promotion.

Fast forward to the near future when the products are RFID tagged and uniquely identifiable, and the retailer and snack food company could dig into far deeper and richer sets of data to ascertain – with great precision – the campaign’s effectiveness. For instance, both parties could discover previously undiscoverable consumer behavior insights such as from which display the items were purchased, which combinations of items were bought (sizes, flavors, etc.), which promotional items were bought with other non-promotional items, and so on. Thus, from this simple example one can only imagine how the increased visibility can be used by retailers (and their supply chain and logistics partners) to create new ways of managing the entire extended enterprise.

RFID and Reverse Logistics

For all the excitement about the advantages that RFID will bring to the forward retail supply chain, the really untold story regards the benefits that the technology will bring to the reverse supply chain. How so? Let’s start at the store level. With each item individually identifiable, the reverse logistics operation can begin with far greater intelligence. Shelves and stock rooms can be scanned to locate expired items that should be discarded and unsold stock that should be returned to the manufacturer for credit and/or shipped to a reseller. Likewise, when an item is returned by a customer, the retailer can track the specific purchase history of the item (where, when, how it was bought). Thus, retailers should be able to immediately spot a fraudulent return, and in time, eliminate that problem, which costs retailers billions annually. In the same way, when an item is returned for warranty work, the specific history of that item can be compiled. For both the retailer and the manufacturer, this will add an “early warning system” for problem items with high return and defect rates, enabling them to pinpoint such concerns far more effectively and quickly than today’s return data.

Perhaps the most important reverse logistics benefit will be in the area of recalls. Today, when products are recalled, it’s a matter of recalling way, way more than necessary – just to be safe. The quintessential example of this is the 2000 recall of Bridgestone/Firestone SUV tires, which involved the recall and replacement of over 6 million tires on Ford Explorers and other like models. If RFID tagging had been in place, rather than the mass recall – and mass hysteria that resulted from it – Bridgestone/Firestone could have been much more precise in its recall and replacement effort, since the problem was deduced to be specific production runs on specific days at its plant in Decatur, Illinois. This would have enabled the company to replace perhaps thousands of tires rather than millions, saving it and Ford immeasurable losses in the marketplace from their damaged brands and reputations. The recall could have been made even more effective by focusing more on the South and West, where warmer temperatures were correlated to higher failure rates for the problem tires.

Recalls in the Pharmaceutical Sector

While product recalls are a concern across all consumer-facing industries, there can be no greater area of emphasis than in the pharmaceutical sector, where product recalls can be a matter of life and death. Indeed, drug recalls are becoming increasingly common. According to the most recent data from the US Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, the number of recalls involving both prescription and non-prescription pharmaceuticals has doubled over the past decade.

The most infamous drug recall case was the Tylenol case of twenty-five years ago. In reaction to the news that consumers had died as a result of product tampering, Johnson & Johnson executives made the decision to recall all Tylenol products. In the long-run, the brand survived and thrived, but in the short-term, the recall had a devastating effect. In fact, Tylenol’s market share in pain relievers at the end of 1982 had fallen to 8%, down from well over a third of the market a year earlier.

Drug recalls are costly endeavors, as they involve much administrative and logistical effort to make sure that all suspect product is taken off store and stockroom shelves and out of distribution channels. They also take a marketing toll on the brand and the company, as unlike with Tylenol, some brands are taken off the market forever or never recover their former standing. In fact, a recent University of Wisconsin study estimates that while the demonstrable cost of the typical drug recall runs into the millions, the decline in shareholder value following a drug recall is twelve times that of the total expenses incurred by firms in conducting the recall, replacing the product, and handling litigation associated with the recall.

An e-Pedigree Standard

EPCGlobal announced earlier this year the development of a broad e-pedigree standard that will work not just for the drug industry, but across many product lines. Having an e-pedigree available will enable drug recalls to be targeted with far greater precision as opposed to the former, “clear the shelves” methods that had to be utilized. For example, in a recent recall of the injectable drug methotrexate, used in the treatment of certain types of cancers and psoriasis, US Oncology was able to use pedigree data to target the recall to only those practices that had received a specific lot, making the process quick and effective.

Thus, in the future, when recalls happen, whether it be for pharmaceuticals or suspect food items, the recalls can be accomplished with far more precision and speed than in the past, thanks to RFID tagging. Retailers can quickly separate cartons and individual units of recalled items from their retail shelves, stockrooms, and distribution centers, eliminating the need for hand searching for the suspect lots of goods. Manufacturers can also be more certain as to the overall completeness and effectiveness of their recall efforts, with new metrics and abilities to analyze the incoming items.

Finally, aside from drug recalls that occur from a specific safety or public health concern, the pharmaceutical companies must absorb costs estimated at exceeding $2 billion annually from the return of outdated and overstocked products. Both at the store and wholesale level, there would be far greater ability to better manage inventory. Lucy Deus, vice president of Product Development for SupplyScape, recently commented that for all parties in the pharmaceutical supply chain, the direct visibility they will have will enable them to better manage shelf life and expiration dates. Also, in regards to managing expiration dates, analysts have projected that if RFID labeling is combined with sensor technology, products could have rolling expiration dates, which could give updated estimates on product usability. For instance, if a drug shipment endures extreme heat conditions during transit, or if a power outage during a blizzard causes products on the shelf to be exposed to harsh cold, the expiration date on the drug bottle or vial could be shortened according to pre-determined algorithms based on research. They could even be instructed to immediately expire if the conditions exceeded certain thresholds.

Analysis

As we consider the ROI of RFID, many times vendors and solutions providers miss the mark in terms of being able to portray what the RFID-enabled future will look like. We worry too much about the small stuff of today’s issues – read rates, tag prices, tag reliability and availability, etc. However, while these mechanical and operational issues indeed need to be worked out quickly, as we look not so far down the road, there is a bright future ahead with incredible, unanticipated returns on the investment in RFID technology from every perspective along consumer-facing supply chains – much of it to be gained in the reverse flow of products. It will be up to those in the auto ID industry to make the case that in the “Google Earth” world, RFID is the right technology to provide the real-time visibility that is vital to effective product management in today’s global economy, enabling retailers, distributors and wholesalers to find the unsold, suspect, outdated, or recalled needle in the haystack in a quick, efficient, and cost-effective manner. Such is managing in the new, new economy, being made possible with RFID.

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David C. Wyld (dwyld@selu.edu) is the Robert Maurin Professor of Management at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. He is a management consultant, researcher/writer, and executive educator. His blog, Wyld About Business, can be viewed at http://wyld-business.blogspot.com/.