86% of shoppers now rely on digital information while shopping. This has resulted in a demand from retailers for ever-increasing amounts of product information. Retailers expect detailed, and often digitally enriched, data for the products they purchase from providers.
Wholesale businesses are rightly making the reduction in time and effort to share product data though reliable digital channels a priority. A digitized product portfolio needs to be married to a digitized sales and data stream process. UNFI Brands+ recognized this need and has united its partnerships with Trace One and Salsify to create a singular, end-to-end PIM workflow.
How Trace One has helped enable the digitization of UNFI Brands+ business
Maintaining customer confidence that your product data adheres to regulations, brand standards, and aligns with the physical packaging, is just as critical as reducing data friction. Trace One has worked with the UNFI Brands+ team for over 6 years, and is the solution they use every day to manage the development of innovative products.
Trace One provides a unified platform of multiple interlocking modules. Each fills a vital role and can be used as a standalone solution, but together they can give brand owners a truly remarkable edge. Working collaboratively with manufacturing partners, UNFI Brands+ gain a deep understanding of their product's potential on pack and digital shelf attributes, which allows them to optimize those products for maximum consumer appeal. The embedded data validation capabilities in Trace One ensure the data meets legislative regulations, and that claims are substantiated. This reduces risk exposure and increases the efficiency of the review and approval process.
Integration powered by specification approval
To fully digitize their business, UNFI Brands+ needed to have specification data from Trace One integrate with Salsify’s Product Experience Management Platform so that product attributes could be seamlessly sent to their customers via multi-channel syndication.
The integration covers new item set-up and changes to the specifications over the lifetime of the products. This meant digital data was aligned to physical packaging as updates occurred.
Trace One worked with both Salsify and UNFI Brands+ teams to provide data that was validated, suitable for the artwork development process, and in the structured format required by GS1 Standards and the GDSN. Trace One’s glossary driven solution, and Salsify’s dynamic data import capabilities provided the technical architecture for success.
“Data integrity, standardized formatting, resource investment – these are all challenges facing us in the digital marketplace. By combining what each partner does best today, UNFI Brands+ is stretching its capability to succeed tomorrow.”
Adam Sinley
Director, Product Development & Quality Assurance
Benefits to UNFI Brands+
The once manual process of data transfer of approved product attributes is now fully automated. This brings real business value to UNFI Brands+.
Trace One’s solution reduces exposure to risk while maintaining a highly innovative product development culture. The consistency between physical packaging and digitally available information beyond the label increases final consumer confidence during the buying process, leading to higher sales volumes.
Internal costs and the time elapsed between a product being launched and making that products' data available to retailer customers has been drastically reduced, while increasing customer satisfaction and sales margins.
