Description

Nowadays, companies are operating on a global scale. They ship branded products from their factories and warehouses to customers. To do so, the brand owners rely on complex and to a certain degree uncontrolled supply chains. These complex supply chains are vulnerable to criminals attempting to introduce counterfeited products into the market. Counterfeits and tampered products represent a serious threat for the brand owners. They can lead to unjustified customer claims and the loss of consumer confidence and market shares.

Currently, many companies are investing in product tracking systems, also called serialization infrastructures. They mark each individual item with a unique random number, which is then stored in a database. Through serialization the supply chain becomes more transparent, making it harder for criminals to infiltrate counterfeits into the market. Nevertheless, compromising these serialization infrastructures is possible because standard ISO barcodes are used for marking the items. These standard barcodes can be easily copied with off the shelf equipment. Today’s serialization infrastructures hardly detect manipulations. This weakness is known by criminals and in fact counterfeits of serialized products have already been reported.

Hicof has the solution to eliminate this risk, by offering THYMARIS a patent protected software suite allowing to differentiate between original barcodes and reprints. As a security overlay to serialization systems it offers a layered approach for protecting products.

• THYMARIS Base allows embedding a hidden information into the serial barcode which gets lost in case of copying the code. Therefore, this technology is extremely robust and well suited for high volume products. Nevertheless, the code is still fully compliant to all relevant ISO/ IEC standards as 16022 and 15415.
• THYMARIS Alpha uses the print inspection cameras installed on all serialization lines to analyze finest print imperfections. This is used to generate an individual security key for each barcode which is uploaded to a cloud database. This key can be later used for authentication via Smartphone.
• THYMARIS Forensic supports the manual comparison of the two barcode images, the original and the suspect sample one. An expert can make the final validation and authentication of a suspect sample.

Hicof THYMRIS is a highly effective security system for fighting against product piracy offering the following benefits:

• Closes security gaps in Track & Trace systems
• Purley software based; No cumbersome marking substances used
• Runs automatically with existing Track & Trace infrastructures of any manufacturer
• Authentication of suspect samples is possible with off the shelf smartphones at a large scale