Smart supply chain tracking of highly regulated substances

End-to-end monitoring and traceability of freight is a key challenge for transportation of highly sensitive and/or regulated substances such as medicinal cannabis. This project will introduce next-generation data capturing devices to enable the product to be monitored at every stage of the supply process, from producer / cultivator to the retailer.

This project will introduce next-generation data capturing devices to enable the product to be monitored at every stage of the supply process, from producer/ cultivator to the retailer.

Participants

• La Trobe University

Project background

End-to-end monitoring and traceability of freight is a key challenge for transportation of highly sensitive medical and/or regulated substances, but equally so for fresh produce and life products. New and emerging digital technologies, combined with an integrated digital supply chain management model can help reduce operating costs, bring efficiency gains, reduce errors.

Other benefits increasingly sought after include reduction of theft, lower the cost of regulatory compliance and improve provenance. Collecting data throughout the supply chain in a consistent manner unlocks the opportunity to create predictive models as well.

This research project will develop and trial such a solution using medicinal cannabis as the use case. This selected use case is very relevant to Australia which is developing a new high-value export in the supply of highly-defined, quality-assured, and fully-traceable medicinal cannabis.

Tight integration of Internet of things (IOT) sensors, data, analytics, and pharmacology will distinguish Australian products and enable diversification into these highly customised product lines for distinct patient groups globally. Medicinal cannabis can address a wide variety of remedies and the ambition is to adjust the growing conditions in order to target and optimise the active substances for specific remedies, enabling diversification into highly customised product lines for distinct patient groups globally.

This project will introduce next-generation data capturing devices along the supply chain, from producer/ cultivator to the distributor or consumer. Automated medicinal cannabis monitoring of environmental parameters and location will not only reduce human errors during manual data entry, but also automate numerous compliances and reporting controls for Australian authorities – e.g. Therapeutic Goods Administration, Office of Drug Control, and regulatory authorities of importers.

It will use an award winning IoT sensor platform for logistics and supply chain management developed at La Trobe (for commercial partner SensaData) and a bespoke blockchain traceability solution developed by project partner AgLive which supports verifiable authenticity and sustainability claims while preventing diversion and adulteration.

Project objectives

The specific objectives of this project are to leverage next-gen data capture technologies and data models to improve the governance, the produce quality, supply chain management efficiency and the supply chain performance. We will do that by:

• Determining the use case data requirements
• Developing an appropriate pilot logistics model and field trial design (incl. number of trials required)
• Developing an integrated data gathering solution (IOT and blockchain technologies as required) for this use case
• Organising pilot field trials to cover the critical supply chain use cases, in order to capture data before and after data with a tracking solution, and;
• Developing analytics and predictive models for securing and optimising the medicinal cannabis supply chain

Please note …

Ongoing, this page will be a living record of this project. As it continues, matures, hits milestones, etc., we’ll add information, links, images, interviews and more. Watch this space!