The increasing potential for counterfeiting within complex global supply chains has made it progressively challenging to ensure the quality, performance and integrity of goods. In this environment, product manufacturers have fallen prey to suppliers who substitute specified raw materials with cheap, lower-quality materials to gain a market advantage.

Commonly, companies are forced to rely on the paper trail, where documents themselves can be forged. Some companies are working toward “blockchain” systems to capture data from documents, or tests in a holistic chain-of-custody database, but these are not easy to implement in supply chains that have typically operated in silos. At the other end of the spectrum are rare earth materials and various fluorescent tracers, which can or have already been compromised.