Shape digital products
When you produce and deliver high value goods and products, you are proud on your branding and want to protect the margins. Competitors and fraudulent parties want to make money on your investments in product development and marketing.
In order to protect yourself and your products from this counterfeit business threat, each product can be provided with a public digital identity (pdi) programmed in an NFC chip, that can be embedded in your product.
With this digital identity (digital twin) it becomes technically as well as logistically harder to fake your products. Each product has a unique component, is recorded digitally and it can be therefor verified anywhere in the world by anyone with a modern mobile device and you see each hit on the IdeAtics pdi Platform.
Authenticity
A product can be tested on authenticity based on material characteristics, chemical composition or in some cases by the experts eye. In all cases it is impossible for consumers, but also for most authorities to perform the tests that required to prove the authenticity of the product, and they do not have the expert eye by definition. That is the pre-requisite by which the counterfeit (or fake) market is largely defined.
By breaking this condition through the use of a public digital identity, a fraudulent market of billions of euros is resolved. In return the manufacturers are generating better margins, and you can continue to invest in your brands for a fair return. The market share of the original products increases allowing traders and resellers to increase their business. And the consumer that is buying an authentic product is protected.
The technology of the digital public identity has been around for some time. However with the introduction of NFC reading capabilities in Windows, Android and iOS mobiles devices there is a huge reading capacity that wasn’t there before. So now every consumer and authority that has a modern mobile device can test each product on its authenticity – and is no longer dependent on chemical, material tests or the expert eye.
The great differentiator of NFC (read more in the information section) is that it can be read ‘out of line of sight’ and therefore can be embedded in the parent material of the product. By laminating the NFC chip during manufacturing, the chip cannot be altered or removed, without destroying the product. Chips or tags can be put in several places or parts of the product. As the public digital identity is fundamentally equal to a URL/URI of the manufacturers domain, the identity as such is unique and secure. On top, the selected NFC chips for this business case are locked after writing and have additional security features to prevent changing the URL or copying.
Every time that the chip in the product is read it will create a record in the IdeAtics pdi Platform with important traceability data like location, time, mobile device specification and tag details. IdeAtics streams this data directly into you enterprise datalakes, data warehouses or BI platform for analysis to monitor the overall status of authenticity of the product estate.
We love to work with your product engineers, your branding and marketing teams, your technology departments and more stakeholders depending on the case at hand. Read how we do that.
Manufacturing
In the design thinking process there is also a part that addresses the scale up of the product design. That often implies an implementation in a manufacturing process. Depending on the type of production process, ranging from make-to-order to discrete to mass production, there are different ways to organize the process of digitizing the product.
In make-to-order and assembly based discrete manufacturing, the coupling between the public digital identity and the physical product is a manual step for which IdeAtics provide a manufacturing mobile app, that is connected with the product data from your enterprise system. In hi-speed mass production the process is automated and requires hi-speed manufacturing grade reader/writer units that are hard wired to edge computers of the IdeAtics pdi Platform.
There is one strategy where the tags are preloaded with a public digital identity, and coupled to the physical product during manufacturing, as outlined above. Alternatively the generation of the pdi is done dynamically during manufacturing and immediately coupled to the data of the physical product.
The exact strategy is depending on many factors that are evaluated with your teams in design thinking sessions that are focused on the scale up, after prototyping has been proven successful.
Digital certificate
Traders and owners of some high value goods can prove the authenticity with a certificate. This traditional process is covered by the public digital identity in the chip(s) in the product.
In some case the traditional certificate can be registered in name. In the digital world we have even a wider range of possibilities. There are several platforms around the world that can certify the identity of a person. The IdeAtics pdi Platform has the possibility to connect with these authentication services for users. Some of those services are based on blockchain technology.