Manufacturers, brand owners, and retailers often fail to make the most of suppliers as collaborative partners when drafting specifications, resulting in drawn-out talks over attributes and tolerances. As a result, working with suppliers and co-manufacturers when updating specifications can be a manual and time-consuming process.
Additionally, maintaining thorough and up-to-date specifications for raw material and finished goods can be cumbersome, especially when manufacturers need version control, authorization, and audit trails. Historically, stakeholders exchange information through email or voicemail, making it challenging to track agreements, supporting documentation, or any other data.
Guaranteeing that suppliers and stakeholders have the latest version of requirements is difficult without automated workflows and update notifications. Siloed data between R & D, quality, regulatory, and purchasing departments delays specification creation and threatens new product development.
We hear from many companies that creating and maintaining raw material and finished goods specifications is labor-intensive and slow. A big hurdle companies face is effective collaboration across departments. When it comes to suppliers, that slow-motion collaboration gets worse. Most businesses are still relying on static tools like spreadsheets, shared drives, and if they-re lucky, sluggish databases to manage specifications. If your company is managing specifications like this, you should know there’s a better way.
With Specification Management, companies don’t have to worry about tracking down suppliers, items, or ingredients to build specifications. Since most food, supplement, and CPG suppliers have uploaded documents and item data into TraceGains Network, we can make it easier. Log into Specification Management and get instant access to all that data to fast-track the specification process. Networked specification management means no more time spent tracking down suppliers and requesting information or documents because you’re already connected, and TraceGains can automate the rest.
With TraceGains, you can digitize everything from raw material to packaging to finished goods specifications and then use the data to power configurable dashboards and reports to determine compliance against label claims, nutrition targets, thresholds, and country of origin. And with an open API, you can pass data from your ERP or PLM system to TraceGains. The result? End-to-end supply chain visibility.
In this on-demand webinar, Senior Product Marketing Manager Matthew Passannante and Sales Engineer Ruben Galbraith share best practices for managing specs and the benefits of networked specification management.
Networked specification management with supplier co-authoring.
Automated version control for risk management and quality control.
Workflows and alerts that drive collaboration and speed across departments and with suppliers.
Configurable dashboards and reports to determine compliance against label claims, nutrition targets, thresholds, and country of origin.