BACKGROUND

Many large companies and small businesses, such as chain and stand-alone grocery stores, retail stores and outlets, as well as online and brick and mortar dealers, rely on having inventory on hand as the life blood of their respective businesses. With an ever-increasing global economy, consumers having an awareness of products made in countries or states other than their own, or otherwise a far distance away, have come to demand, and been provided with, access to such products. Accordingly, businesses like those mentioned above, in order to compete and remain profitable, must obtain inventory such as food from Colombia, medical devices from China, pharmaceuticals from Vermont, electronics from Maine, drinks from Mexico, cosmetics from Italy, etc. With that comes an almost equal reliance on the service providers these businesses use to have products produced and transported from a point of origin to their warehouses and stores.

Importing products, or having a source of goods on the other side of a country as large as the United States (U.S.), poses many risks for inventory reliant businesses. Not only are correct quantities and expected product quality/integrity far from guaranteed, the service provider, nature of a product, and modes and routes for transport can put in doubt whether ordered inventory is even received at all. For example, a grocery chain may use a shipping company to ship containers full of the chain's nation-wide inventory of packaged coconut water from Panama to the country of the grocery store chain. Every time the shipping company comes to a port in that country and offloads the containers full of coconut water, the containers may or may not be examined by a government or regulatory agency. Examination may be initiated based on the type of product, issues with the producer or manufacturer or the shipping company in the past, issues occurring in transit, or other products in other containers on the ship having a propensity to cross-contaminate products in adjacent or nearby containers. In some cases, circumstances and history surrounding the type of product, the country the product came from, or who the buyer, seller, manufacturer, or international shipper is, could be determinative of whether a compliance event occurs when those containers are onloaded onto a ship or airplane, offloaded from the ship or airplane, and/or transported via truck or rail to a single or multiple destinations.

Types of compliance events, ones that may be tracked, can differ from country to country. In some countries compliance events can involve: issuing of a letter from a regulatory agency serving as a warning; inspections being conducted infrequently, frequently, or even every time a certain product is offloaded from a truck or ship, or a certain provider is used for shipping, or a certain provider is used to manufacture or produce a product; alerts being issued so that different divisions of a regulatory agency take the same action when a particular product enters that division's jurisdiction; products being refused upon arrival at a port or intermediate node of a supply chain; or a recall of products. The occurrence of any type of compliance event can delay, or all together eliminate, the delivery of significant portions of a business's most valued asset—its inventory.

Different countries can employ different systems, promulgate different rules, have one or more regulatory and/or private agencies that enforce those rules (differently in some cases), different penalties for violations, and various ways to assess the severity of violations. In addition, some countries may track each type of a designated compliance event with a different system. Tapping into these disparate systems for information about providers subject to compliance events can be further complicated by the fact that the providers being monitored may not be referred to in the same way in each system. Different facilities for the same provider may be listed as different providers, some systems may employ one type of registry while other systems may recognize an identifier attached to a certification that not all facilities of a provider are required to have, or each has its own.

For example, in the U.S., companies that want to import products from another country often must register with the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”). Manufacturers (that, for the purposes of the present disclosure, are considered one type of provider of product movement services) in other countries where the above companies obtain their products from, may also have to be registered with the FDA. However, the provider can have multiple facilities, and each facility may have its own registration with the FDA. When products arrive to the U.S., these imports may be inspected for some of the reasons discussed above, or also for markings to prevent counterfeit goods, or goods that infringe U.S. patents or trademarks from entering the U.S. market. As a result, these products may be seized or held up, and a business having no knowledge of a manufacturer or shipping company's practices, may never see those products or recoup the cost paid to get the products to the point where they were seized.

Staying with the FDA as an example, the agency tracks different types of compliance events with different databases, and can issue notifications for each type of compliance event through a respective channel of communication. More specifically, the FDA's Import Alert, Import Refusal, Enforcement Action, Inspection Classification, and Warning Letter Databases are accessible through each's own website, and are akin to independent silos of information. In addition, not each of these databases catalogue providers' respective activities according to a facility FDA Establishment Identifier (FEI). Even with this identifier, it is not uncommon for one facility, even though operated by a single company, to have multiple FEIs. Multiple facilities or divisions of a provider not being grouped with that provider is also an issue.

Thus, it is both time consuming and potentially unworkable for businesses or U.S. registrants to use the FDA's “silos” of information to determine whether they should start or continue to use particular providers. There is currently no system that would enable a business to view, obtain, and store information regarding all of the compliance events, of each compliance event type, that even one, let alone all, of their providers may have been involved with. On a more fundamental level, even if this combination of information could be obtained (which currently it cannot be), there is currently no system that would enable a business to enter their providers into some type of interface or repository for the purposes of doing any of (a) regularly receiving automatic pushes, (b) continuous tracking, or (c) one-time aggregations—of storable current and historical information records of transactions and/or events. This is especially the case for compliance events occurring over a substantial period of time, such as 3 years, or even as recently as within the last 30 days. This also inhibits a party's ability to assess the potential for a compliance event to occur if the party employs the provider to manufacture, transport, or otherwise provide a product movement related service.

As a result, a need exists for systems and methods capable of analyzing product movement information from multiple independently formatted/configured sources, and associate a provider with all the compliance events that involve that provider directly, or the provider's facilities, or the provider's subsidiaries, close affiliates, etc. In addition, a need exists for systems and methods that can provide a comprehensive picture of a provider's ability, historically, to perform its respective services in a manner that is compliant with one or more regulatory regimes (which logically can be used as an indication of the potential for the provider to be subject to compliance events in the future).

SUMMARY

Examples described herein include systems and methods for analyzing product movement information and generating compliance profiles. A system according to the present disclosure can include one or more servers that implement one or more services that are configured to communicate and aggregate information from various external sources of information regarding product movements.

Product movements include any manufacturing or production by any means, or transport by any mode of transportation, of one or more products for which a record can be generated. Thus, product movements include any development, manufacture, processing, packaging, labeling, production (e.g., growing), importation, exportation, transport, onloading, offloading, storage, distribution, or retail selling: produce; commercial, perishable, or raw food, beverage, or supplement products; medical devices; drugs; cosmetics; electronic devices; subcomponents of electronic devices; tobacco products; biologics or biologic material; heavy machinery; any product that is imported into or exported out of any country by any means; or any products transported in bulk within any country. Accordingly, shipments of containers, and transports of products in bulk by land, sea, air, express carrier, mail, or carried into a country, such as the U.S., by travelers from any point of origin to any destination, are considered product movements for the purposes of the present disclosure. Further, acts of onloading and offloading containers or lots of products, from a point of origin or one mode of transport, to another mode of transport or a final destination, are considered product movements.

In one example, the plurality of external information sources may include records of product movements reported according to respective formats encompassing different categories or data fields, or even different ways of reporting the same data element such as a date or an address of providers of product movement related services. In another example, once product movement information is aggregated, a system of the present disclosure converts the product information into provider transactions by identifying providers within the product movement information across any and all formats. Provider transactions may be grouped together according a provider identified for the transactions, and stored in a memory, database, or other type of electronic repository. A provider transaction may therefore include a provider of a product movement service, a type of product movement service provided, and location or location(s) where the service was provided.

Product movement information, depending on the external source, may include just those records of product movements (A) for which a compliance event or other issue did not occur, or (B) that involved a compliance event. With respect to (B), some external sources may even be specific to certain types of compliance events. A compliance event can include: an inspection of any lot of products; a letter issued by a regulatory agency or a generally recognized authority in any country regarding a product movement; an alert issued by a regulatory agency or a recognized authority regarding a certain product of a provider; detainments or seizures of products; a refusal of products at a port, weigh station, transfer point, or destination; or a recall of products by a manufacturer, government, regulatory agency, or recognized authority in any country. External sources of this type of product movement information can include databases maintained by governments, organizations, or private companies that are responsible for regulating or reporting on the regulation of product movements at transfers points, ports of entry, borders between countries or states, and the like.

A system according to the present disclosure may implement a service through a server or other computing device that is configured to assign unique controlling identifiers to providers based on parsing and analyzing the provider transactions. In addition, the system can identify compliance events included in the provider transactions, and associate those compliance events with respective controlling identifiers for the providers involved in the compliance events. Based on compliance events and final dispositions of provider transactions associated with a provider, risk factor scores may be generated for the provider and associated with the provider's controlling identifier. The risk factor scores can be generated by applying a scoring system to the provider's transactions and compliance events.

In one example, a set of risk factor scores can be determined for a provider's overall activity. In addition, a set of risk factor scores can be separately determined for each product the provider deals with. These risk factor scores may be components of a provider's respective compliance profile, and used to determine other components, such as an overall compliance score, for the provider. In one example, a compliance profile can include an overall compliance risk score for a provider, and individual product compliance risk scores for each product the provider deals with. Each compliance risk score indicates the provider's track record, and potential ability, for complying with various laws and regulations, which in turn can be viewed as an indicator of the provider's ability to avoid damage to, delays in delivery of, or confiscations of products in the course of providing its respective product movement services.

In another example according to the present disclosure, compliance profiles can be requested and presented through a graphical user interface. Accordingly, an individual or entity can request and view a compliance profile for a provider it does business with, or is considering doing business. As a result, the individual or entity can make a decision that is based on accurate information regarding a particular provider's past performances. In effect, the individual or entity would have the option, prior to making that decision, to use that accurate information to inform their own estimation of the likelihood or probability that its products will reach a desired destination, at an expected time, and in an expected condition, if the particular provider is used for one or more required product movement services. Further, a system of the present disclosure would significantly improve their ability to verify if that particular provider was compliant with the rules and the laws the provider was required to comply with. In some countries, such as the U.S., individuals and entities may be required by law or regulation, such as the Foreign Supplier Verification Program (“FSVP”), to provide assurances, and in some cases evidence, that their providers are in compliance with recognized product movement procedures that provide at least a certain level of (health, safety, environmental) protection that have been recognized by a country, governmental body, regulatory body, or private concern having itself been recognized to some acceptable degree.

The examples summarized above can each be incorporated into a non-transitory, computer-readable medium having instructions that, when executed by a processor associated with a computing device, cause the processor to perform the stages described. Additionally, the example methods summarized above can each be implemented in a system including, for example, a memory storage and a computing device having a processor that executes instructions to carry out the stages described.

Both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory only and are not restrictive of the examples, as claimed.

