SAIT’s Anti-Counterfeiting and Traceability Solution Addresses Product Safety and Quality

Consumer protection is always important, but recent stories about tainted products have raised product safety and quality as critical global issues. SAIT, an Oracle partner based in Italy, is winning accolades for its Anti-Counterfeiting and Traceability solution that offers an effective way for businesses to ensure product quality and safety in the international marketplace. This cutting-edge solution was recently recognized with a 2008 Oracle Partner Innovation Award for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region.

The Anti-Counterfeiting and Traceability solution uses Oracle 10g and Oracle Application Server 10g to trace food products through warehouse monitoring, improve logistics efficiency, and integrate with accounting systems and anti-counterfeiting capabilities. The solution allows both the consumer and the producer to get detailed logistics information about a product via radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to ensure that products labeled with country-of-origin information, for example, do in fact originate from that particular country. RFID tagged products—each outfitted with a virtually impossible to duplicate identifier chip— can be easily monitored as they move through the entire production and distribution chain. Important data about each shipment can be collected at any point of its journey with a Java-enabled mobile data capture device, running standard Web browsers and connected via wireless local area networks.

According to Mario Beltrami, mode2 RFID division manager at SAIT, the solution was originally created for a local vintner. “SAIT is located in the center of Franciacorta, an area famous for the production of wine,” says Beltrami. “Our customer, Azienda Agricola Bellavista, wanted to fulfill legal obligations for consumer protection, which are quite stringent in Italy. They also wanted to maintain the quality of their products and follow bottles throughout the entire supply chain.”

SAIT also offers its solution via Software as a Service (SaaS), which makes it a particularly appealing solution for small wineries. Many growing customers do not have the budget or staff to implement the complete Anti-Counterfeiting and Traceability solution, but they can still dramatically improve security and quality using SAIT’s solution in an SaaS environment. With this solution, midsize companies can access SAIT’s software via the internet, giving them secure environments, configured and customized according to actual needs. The cost of the SaaS solution is directly proportional to the number of transactions processed by a customer and directly connected to a company’s production volume. This is a boon for growing companies because with SaaS, they can easily scale IT spending to parallel production increases and business growth.

“The modern Automatic Identification and Data Capture technology, using IP to communicate, allows our SaaS solution to provide an enabling factor for companies wishing to have a modern approach to global competition and that see information sharing as valuable for the supply chain and consumers,” Beltrami says.

Customer response to SAIT’s solution—software ten years in the making—has been positive. The company is in negotiations with potential customers in the fashion industry, an industry particularly sensitive to counterfeiting issues. Beltrami predicts that demand will continue for logistics solutions in the global economy, thanks to the importance logistics plays in the retail and e-commerce arenas, as well as in moving products at seaports and airports.

Paolo Cinieri, innovation development and deployment director for Oracle EMEA, says, “While SAIT’s solution started in the food market, it is easily applicable cross-market, including medical, pharmaceutical, and fashion industries.”