PwC: From vulnerable to valuable - how integrity can transform a supply chain

"Close monitoring of suppliers will help mitigate supply chain risk for food and drink manufacturers in a volatile trading environment ....

Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) said its new publication entitled From vulnerable to valuable: how integrity can transform a supply chain aims to create awareness about how supply chain disruptions threaten shareholder value and provides advice on best practices to put in place to reduce these risks."

See the article, Keep in your suppliers' loop, urges new report. Find there a link for downloading the new report.

The Takeaway: How to make our food safety system stronger

Here's the introduction to an interview of Bill Marler, a Seattle attorney, on The Takeaway on Friday, January 23, 2009:

Salmonella-tainted peanut butter has sickened close to five hundred people in 43 states, and killed six. People started getting sick back in September, but the FDA has only recently pinpointed the source of the infection as King Nut brand peanut butter manufactured by Peanut Corporation of America in Blakely, Georgia. Bill Marler, a Seattle lawyer who represents victims of food poisoning and advises companies on food safety joins John and Adaora to explain why it takes so long to trace foodbourne illnesses and how the system could be improved.

Click here to listen to the several minute interview.

NY Times: Privacy Issue Complicates Push to Link Medical Data

Here's an excerpt from the New York Times article published 17 January 2009:

President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to link up doctors and hospitals with new information technology, as part of an ambitious job-creation program, is imperiled by a bitter, seemingly intractable dispute over how to protect the privacy of electronic medical records ....

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island ... [says] electronic medical records could be more secure than paper records.

"If the files are electronic," Mr. Whitehouse said, "computers can record every time someone has access to your medical information." But, he said, the challenge is political as well as technical.

"Until people are more confident about the security of electronic medical records," Mr. Whitehouse said, "it’s vitally important that we err on the side of privacy."*

For the complete article, go to Privacy Issue Complicates Push to Link Medical Data. Appropos to this article is a blog I published in May, 2008 entitled Personal Health Records, Data Portability and the Continuing Privacy Paradigm when Google Health was first offered.

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* emphasis added

Pardalis announces impending issuance of second New Zealand patent

Stillwater, Okla., U.S., January 12, 2009 - Pardalis, Inc. announced today that a Notice of Acceptance was issued on October 22, 2008 by the Commonwealth of New Zealand for a second Common Point Authoring^TM system patent.

The New Zealand Notice of Acceptance for Patent Application No. 546907 covers the essential claims as previously issued to Pardalis by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for US Patent #7,136,869. The US '869 patent is the second US issued patent for the Common Point Authoring^TM system.

"I just received the Notice of Acceptance of the patent, Common Point Authoring System for Tracking and Authenticating Objects in a Distribution Chain," said Steve Holcombe, Pardalis' CEO. "This is the first international issuance of Pardalis’ second U.S. patent. New Zealand was the first country outside of the U.S. to issue on Pardalis’ first patent, US Patent #6,671,696. This bodes well for continued success of Pardalis’ global IP strategy."

For an earlier news release regarding the issuance by New Zealand of Pardalis' first U.S. patent, see Pardalis receives New Zealand Letters Patent.

"The Company's patent attorney, James Graziano of Patton & Boggs, is very successfully executing a global IP strategy to obtain protections outside of the United States," Holcombe said. "Filings relevant to Pardalis’ U.S. issued patents are also being zealously pursued under the Patent Cooperation Treaty in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe, Hong Kong, India, Japan, and Mexico."

About Pardalis, Inc.

Pardalis' mission is to promote the granular sharing of confidential, trustworthy and traceable data along complex supply chains, and within the emerging Data Web, by empowering information owners and producers with innovative Common Point Authoring^TM methods. For more information about Pardalis' patents, visit http://pardalis.squarespace.com/patents/.

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© Pardalis, Inc., 1994-2009. All Rights Reserved. Pardalis, the Pardalis logo and Common Point Authoring are registered trademarks or trademarks of Pardalis.

Microsoft Office Applications and Data Ownership

Part I of a two-part series ....

Microsoft Office Applications as Seamless Supply Chain Tools

There is systemic supply chain problem for small businesses (defined here as 1 to 10 employees in size) that reverberates throughout our global economies. It may be seen in any product or service supply chain comprised of small businesses.

• In other words, in the 'last mile' of any and every supply chain.

Of all the product supply chains in the world the U.S. beef livestock and meat products' industry is arguably the most challenging. There are approximately 110 million cattle in the U.S. and Canadian beef supply chain. Each year, about 44 million animals are slaughtered. In the U.S. there are approximately 1 million beef cattle operations the vast majority of which are small farms and family-owned operations commonly using Microsoft Office Excel for electronically storing and managing their livestock data.

Practically none of that data is shared, and even when it is shared it's in the form of difficult to trace and authenticate paperwork, faxes, e-mails and phone calls.

One reason is that there has heretofore been no 'chain of custody' SaaS designed for small businesses. Not only that but neither Microsoft Excel nor any other components of the Microsoft Office Applications (like Outlook or Word) have yet to be designed to be supply chain traceability and authentication solutions for small businesses.

Other reasons have to do with common fear factors. Farmers and ranchers constantly wrestle with convergent 'data ownership' issues related to genetics, pharmaceuticals, food safety, traceability, authentication, government regulation, product marketability, health records, and information producer confidentiality.

• Why provide ammunition to a competitor?
• Why let the government (i.e., the USDA, FDA, IRS, etc.) know how many cattle you - as a farmer - really own?
• And why do so especially if you - as a farmer - don't see an increase on your return on investment (ROI)?

So, the small businesses of de-centralized U.S. agri-food supply chains are not providing customers or regulators with traceable, pedigree data about their crops and livestock.

• The result? Continuing U.S. food safety crises. Mad cow prions, tainted spinach, hamburger recalls, etc.

And you don't have to be guilty, either, to be ensnared. The 2008 tomato recalls found the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wrongly fingering the tomato industry for salmonella poisonings. That went on for weeks.

• What if small business users of Microsoft Office Applications could be seamlessly linked to the large and mid-sized enterprises already using ERP, CRM, SCM and other federated supply chain solutions?
• For example, what if a metadata service layer could transform Microsoft Excel into a supply chain solution for increasing ROI for small farmers who could then be paid for both their cash crop and the pedigree data identifying the history of their cash crop?
• And what if that metadata service layer also directly addressed the ‘data ownership’ fears prevalent among U.S. farmers that their data will be wrongly used by regulators or unfairly exploited by competitors?

Pardalis’ Metadata Service Platform

Pardalis’ metadata service platform helps draw small businesses into the emerging ‘Cloud’. With Microsoft technology (Windows server, SQL server, .Net, Excel-like UI), Pardalis has engineered a metadata SaaS platform for small business end-users to granularly author, register and control immutable data objects. Pardalis' business rules advance the capabilities of a relational database (i.e., SQL) toward an emerging, object-oriented Cloud. But the end-users merely see it as an affordable service for ‘banking’, porting and controlling access to their data products using a SaaS-anized Excel-like user-interface.

Early Market Validation

Pardalis’ platform is being deployed by CalfAID, a USDA process verified RFID cattle tracking program using ISO 9000 series standards for documented quality management systems. CalfAID is owned by the small farmers comprising the North Dakota Beef Cattle Improvement Association, and administered by North Dakota State University for:

• Linking small beef producers, feedlots, processors and restaurants with consumers,
• Bringing ultra-high frequency, RFID tags to commercial viability,
• Protecting livestock producers, food system industries, veterinary health, and consumer health from accidental or intentional disease outbreaks, and
• Overcoming the ‘scary picture’ of RFID tracking by empowering small farmers with direct, granular, data portability control over their identities and pedigree data.

The Value of Microsoft Office Applications As Seamless Supply Chain Tools

The vertical value of pedigree data gathered from agri-food supply chains, using Microsoft Office Applications communicating through a Pardalis metadata service layer, can now be monetized:

• Consumers retrieving deep search results (permission being granted by a data owner)  to determine food history, quality and safety,
• Retailers promoting consumer loyalty with pedigree-driven purchase orders directly communicated back through the metadata service layer to small business farmers,
• Farmers discovering a new profit center - pedigree data about their cash crops,
• RFID product vendors selling outside of federated supply chains and into the ’last mile’, and
• Regulators receiving more and better data for rapidly responding to food health crises.

Horizontally Monetizing SaaS in the Cloud with Data Ownership

Challenges related to data chain of custody are not limited to agri-food. There are approximately 500 million world-wide end-users of Microsoft Office Applications. So, what would be the definition of 'data ownership' that might horizontally pull these end-users into SaaS-anized versions of their Office Applications residing in the Cloud?

• That is, into the 'software plus services' versions of Office Applications as envisioned by Steve Ballmer for Windows Azure?

Empower the end-users with SaaS tools for tracing access to their data objects one-step, two steps, three-steps, etc. after the initial share. They'll know what data ownership is when they see it. The result? The Cloud becomes inflated sooner rather than later with traceable, trustworthy, authenticated data that would otherwise go missing from the invisible hand of informational capitalism.

• That is, sail past the siren-songs of abstract, privacy laws that small businesses don't trust anyway, and capacitate those small business with real, hands-on functionalities that they viscerally recognize as data ownership.

And then watch those small businesses grease the wheels for monetizing SaaS in the Cloud.

Go to Part II ...