The following topics discuss concepts you are required to grasp before you can understand business challenges that QAD Serialization addresses.

Packaging is a coordinated system of preparing goods for transport, warehousing, logistics, sale, and end use. Goods are manufactured and packaged and typically have multiple levels of packaging to support all logistics activities that occur from manufacturing to consumption of manufactured items.

Depending on the type of business, companies may require that more or fewer levels be tracked and traced in logistics operations. Labels are printed and applied to packs having serial numbers to uniquely identify each shipping unit.

Many products move through the supply chain in a packaged format, making handling, storage, and other processing more efficient. This method helps reduce handling costs and damage by reducing individual handling.

When companies use multiple-level packing, each level can be assigned its own LPN. In this way, when the higher-level packing unit is reconstructed, the lower-level packing units can be easily managed through their own LPNs.

An ePedigree is an electronic record, containing information about each transaction, resulting in the change of ownership of a specific item or packaging unit from the manufacturer through the supply chain to the final consumer. For example, pharmaceutical manufacturers with business in California are required by the California ePedigree act to have partially implemented ePedigree, beginning around 2015.

The ability to maintain and view packaging data at the smallest salable packaging unit provides tracking and tracing abilities for the product across the supply chain. Also important is the ability to track how packages are transformed as they move through the supply chain. To be more specific, this capability tracks packaging the lowest-level items into packs, building packs, repackaging, pack returns, and so on.

These two distinct concepts—item serializing and ePedigree—require two distinct, different solutions in industry: You can generate a pedigree at the lot level without serialization, and you can serialize product without generating a serialized pedigree.