Elly Yates-Roberts |
When making a purchase, consumers want to know where and how their chosen products were made, and how they have impacted people and the planet during the process of transforming them from raw materials to finished goods. To meet consumer expectations, retailers and consumer packaged goods companies (CPGs) must gather comprehensive data from across their supply chains. However, this is challenging.
Modern supply chains often involve multiple suppliers worldwide, making it difficult for retailers and CPGs to identify and connect with all parties to get the data they need. Plus, most supply chain data is shared via email or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which are not agile or fast enough to meet growing consumer and regulatory demands.
This is where Transparency-One’s global cloud platform can help. Hosted on Microsoft Azure, it uses Neo4j graph technology to map and connect thousands of interconnected supply chain nodes to enable retailers and CPGs to engage with suppliers, collect data, trace products and monitor compliance from one centralised platform that is updated in real time.
The Transparency-One platform functions as a business-to-business social network, allowing retailers and CPGs to ask for product, facility and sustainability information from their tier one suppliers, who then pass the request down the chain until they have this data for every raw material and individual product. This ensures compliance with corporate social responsibility and sustainable sourcing requirements. All data is verified by Transparency-One’s partner, inspection and certification company SGS.
Businesses can also use Transparency-One to analyse aggregated supply chain data to identify risks for product safety, social responsibility and sustainability across the entire supply chain network. By doing this, retailers and CPGs can proactively address areas of concern and identify opportunities for improvement.
Transparency-One has helped multiple retailers to improve product lifecycle management processes. For example, French retailer Intermarché uses the solution to manage source-to-store traceability across its organic product lines to ensure over 3,000 suppliers are meeting standards. Transparency-One also empowered Intermarché to create a QR code for consumers to scan in stores to discover more about product origins. Similarly, a major food brand has used the platform to track the supply chain for fruits from over 1,000 farms and leverage data for marketing teams to promote sustainability efforts.
Platforms like Transparency-One will become critical tools for other retailers as growing numbers of consumers demand to know more about the origins of the products they buy.
Chris Morrison is CEO at Transparency-One
This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.