EVREN OZKAYA
Founder & CEO of Supply Chain Wizard, LLC. USA

In 2012, while attending a Track & Trace Technology Seminar in Washington, D.C., I was inspired to put pen to paper to begin creating a framework for ROI calculations for the global serialization compliance program I was leading for a key pharmaceutical manufacturer.

Company management had begun to wonder if there could be any return-on-investment (ROI) on this massive capital outlay. With a serialization deadline for California – America’s most populous state, home to approximately 10% of its citizens – only two years away, one of our executives even asked, with a heavy dose of sarcasm, whether there is any ROI for compliance with the California regulation, suggesting a comparison between the significant investment required to comply versus the income generated in the state.

And while this cynical yet revealing remark was made irrelevant by the passage of nationwide serialization legislation – the US Drug Supply Chain Security Act, which takes effect this coming November – the point was clear: How much money can we justify spending simply to comply with a mandate? 

As it turns out, this ROI question was sta ...