CARREFOUR GROUP MANAGES RISK EXPOSURE AND COST INFLATION WITH TRACE ONE PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS

Company

In the retail sector, Carrefour holds many world class titles - largest hypermarket chain, second largest retail group in revenues, and third largest in profit. Founded in 1957, the group had 2008 annual revenues of 86.97€ billion and employs some 490 thousand people. 

Carrefour launched its first private label product in 1976. Today, with nearly 20,000 private label SKUs, and a private label strategy of continuous expansion, Carrefour must manage all the standard problems of private label products, but at a scale that is simply unimaginable for most retailers.

Challenge

Carrefour Group launches more than 1,000 new private label products every year. This represents a huge volume of data that needs to be managed and updated.

“The retailer is considered as the manufacturer of its private label products. This means we need to manage the quality information of our products as if we were in the factory. We need to know everything about the products,” said Hervé Gomichon, Quality Director, Carrefour Group.

“As we’re legally responsible, we need to have a technical contract with the supplier that can be easily updated if any changes occur. We need to be sure we have the latest version.”

Solution

Trace One’s private label Product Specifications management solution, designed for large and smaller retailers and their suppliers, was the “logical solution”. During the past three years, Carrefour has been able to centralize all the product specifications information in an online database, use electronic signature to sign the document with its suppliers, and finally share the information with all the parties involved in the product development (packaging, etc.).

RESULTS

“We sign between 100 and 200 product specifications per month. It works very well! Once you have all your information inside the database, it takes you only 5 to 10 minutes to make a new version!”


“Less paper, high productivity, quicker time -to-signature, and managed quality and risks are the real benefits of this system. Today, it takes us only 1 hour to manage an alert on an ingredient. We just have to check the database.”


In a context where retailers are faced with increasing risk exposure (legal constraints, sourcing risk, more product launches, quicker renewal rates, flat resources), solutions must be found to prevent and balance them. “Trace One is one of our best solutions today to prevent risk and cost inflation.”