Product authentication: a two fold beneficial approach to protect brand owners and consumers

Nowadays, any business can face disruption in production due to automation, dematerialization and changes in the value chain. To keep well positioned among competitors, companies are forced to continuously innovate, by proposing new products and services according to consumers’ needs. Diversified products portfolios can be easily proposed, just by gathering digitally, any related information from people, assets and processes as an added value to differentiate (i.e. the data goldmine). However, such strategy is not free of complexity and challenges, but the outcomes are very promoting at operational and strategic levels. Supply chains are not away from such context where manufactures are becoming increasingly digital by leveraging useful technologies that can help in the monitoring and optimization of their business performance. It is the era of Industry 4.0, where any physical thing, person or process has a near real-time copy (its digital twin) to expose useful information for fast and predictive decisions resulting in smart connected products.