Trace One work with major retailers and manufacturers throughout Europe, such as Monoprix, Carrefour and Auchan, to improve the collaboration process on own-label products. The Trace One packaging module is a solution that allows e-collaborative management of the private label packaging design process for faster time-to-market.

Outdated Communications Methods in Use
Retailers traditionally rely on phone calls and endless e-mails to communicate with manufacturers and other third parties to make even basic changes to packaging specifications. This inevitably slows down communication with other parties and takes longer for specifications to be approved. This delay in approval can have a big impact on the success of the final product, especially when the quickest product to market is often the one that is the most successful. In this competitive market, retailers need to make sure that they communicate as effectively as possible.

Collaboration Is the Answer
Trace One enables all the professionals involved in the process of managing and maintaining own label products to work together simultaneously on packaging information in real-time including designers, quality managers and packaging professionals. Trace One’s solution is a SaaS (Software as a Service) product, an online platform that all parties can access for launching and managing products, allowing them to better communicate throughout the entire process. Traditionally, developing the packaging of private label goods is time consuming for all involved in the process, from quality professionals, to health and safety departments, designers and printers. The results that can be achieved by the platform include reducing the overall time to market by 20 percent and more projects can be managed with exactly the same resources.  

The benefits that the packaging portal provides to retailers and manufacturers is that it allows them to accelerate development of product packaging to reduce time to market, as well as effectively manage the increasing number of packaging projects each year. Furthermore, these projects can be managed securely between internal departments and external parties involved in the packaging process. This goal is achieved through giving each user a designated level of access so that they can only access and have an impact on the parts of the process that they need to do their jobs effectively. The platform speeds up and facilitates the collaborative review of packaging artworks and documents, such as monitoring the progress, tracking and making modifications, which all help to reduce errors in the final product.

Validation Offers ‘Single Version of the Truth’
For any project, the platform works by using a “single version of the truth” that has to be approved by all parties involved. A central document library also reduces the time spent searching for documents and safely stores every resource online for all authorised users to access. Because all product specifications and information is readily available and stored online, the information can be re-used between different projects, saving time in creating new products and speeding route to market.

The Trace One packaging portal is currently used by 10 retailers, 80 percent of French suppliers and 40 percent of European suppliers. The Trace One packaging portal is the only solution in the market that allows the re-use of information to allow retailers to create new own-label products. The portal creates a standard platform that both retailers and manufacturers can work from and is already in use by large brands within the industry. Trace One’s technology increases efficiencies and reduces time to market, allowing retailers and manufacturers to focus on innovation. This solution allows them to remain competitive in the highly pressured own-label market place and ultimately to make more profits.