Trace One
All-Inclusive Cog between Retailers and Suppliers

Private labels came to the rescue of consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic owing to the supply chain disruption caused by lockdowns across the world, resulting in less availability of their favourite brand products. Increased buying of private labels caused a shift in customer loyalties and purchasing behaviour. It became imperative for the retailers to take advantage of this change in customer outlook about private labels. Though the behemoths like Amazon or Target, who have been launching their private brands for some years now, understand the network of the suppliers, small and medium-sized retailers lack the know-how of taking their private label endeavour from idea to shelf. Realizing the opportunity and potential of collaboration between suppliers and retailers, Trace One has developed a suite of applications within a single, inclusive platform.

“We are providing several kinds of applications for retailers and suppliers in our PLM suite to develop and manage product specifications that retailers would like to propose to their consumer,” says Benoit Gruber, Director of Marketing Client. The company offers Trace One platform where retailers can identify reliable suppliers and manage tenders from a single space.

With all kinds of business applications in one platform, retailers need not traverse through multiple platforms to consolidate information throughout the product life cycle. Retailers and suppliers can use these applications to accelerate product development, manage costs, ensure compliance with regulations and meet consumer expectations. In bringing a product to the shelf, especially CPG and FMCG products, retailers need to provide much information on the product label. They also need to ensure that the supplier follows all the required compliance specific to geographical boundaries. In addition, there are innovative practices adopted by the suppliers in packaging the product and manufacturing it. Most importantly, the retailers require a lot of RFx documentation from bidding to tender. Trace One has taken into consideration this entire life cycle of product development in its platform.

The all-encompassing collaborative platform amalgamates a supplier marketplace, PLM Suite, E-sourcing, and Retail Data and Insight software. In Trace One Marketplace, a supplier can list its products and expose it to retailers across the globe. The supplier can mention their certifications, product specifications and financial health on the platform. They can choose to display their products to a particular target group of retailers and enter new markets by sending quotations and closing new deals. For retailers, Trace One E-sourcing solutions helps in identifying a supplier from the pool of suppliers, comparing their products and offerings, requesting sourcing and samples, and communicating with their team to work on the RFx documentation. Also, the platform can provide product and project level tracking information with a 360-degree view of crucial concerns like identifying risk or opportunity through private label data. The retailers can further access reports to share critical insights with all the stakeholders and identify areas in the business about legislation and compliance.

The utterly digital collaboration between the suppliers and retailers is the backbone of the Trace One platform. “We are providing all tools that retailers need to have to work properly with a supplier to create the best product from their private label,” says Gruber. And the company has been consistently coming up with additional features to complete the life cycle of the product development. One such update will be the external audit capability to ensure that the product meets all the regulatory requirements.