Dentsu Tracking Celebrates First Anniversary of EU Collaboration on Tobacco Supply Chain Control (EU TPD) Solutions

Today a year ago, the EU TPD  (EU Tobacco Products  Directive) came into force in Europe. Dentsu Tracking, a trademark of the Dentsu Aegis Network, works with the European Commission and 27 member states to design and operate a technical supply chain control solution across the European tobacco industry in compliance with the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

It is the world's largest platform in terms of the number of events and products tracked. As of the current status, the system tracks more than 32 billion products and billions of events taking place at more than 750,000 registered economic operators in the 27 EU countries.

“The EU TPD solution sets a new standard for government supply chain control. The current design and architecture set a new technical standard, and the findings from the first year clearly speak for its success, "  said Philippe Castella , Managing Director of Dentsu Tracking.

“The European model provides rigorous compliance standards and takes an innovative approach to the framework agreement by requiring full traceability for every step of the supply chain. This can certainly serve as a model for future supply chain renewal and regulations in other industries such as the alcohol and beverage industry. "

Innovation with authorities to fight illegal trade  

Authorities and law enforcement agencies across the EU now have a tool that gives them full visibility of the entire tobacco supply chain.  

"The system is a means for government agencies to implement their supply chain control requirements based on data-based insights from huge data lakes and to use them to reduce the supply of illegal products,"  said Benjamin Phelip, sales and marketing manager at Dentsu Tracking.

State ministries and authorities can use the data and visibility from the EU Secondary Repository (the secondary data store designed, implemented and operated by Dentsu Tracking) to identify unusual trading patterns and to enable further innovation of the tobacco control guidelines to combat illegal trade.

The Dentsu Tracking solution ensures data availability almost in real time, i.e. an almost immediate response to requests at macro level (e.g. determination of trends and anomalies, or market statistics) or to requests at micro level (e.g. inspection and verification of a single one Cigarette box, a specific warehouse or a specific truck).

This solution is, on the one hand because of its size and on the other hand because of the right to enforcement online, more careful than any other existing system. Online enforcement means that the data is not only stored passively, but there is a process of data reporting, data validation and approval for each step, and all of this takes place in under 60 seconds.