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Product Lifecycle Management
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Regulatory
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Trace One
Compliance by Design: The Future of Product Lifecycle Management
Note from the editor: this article originally appeared in CIO Review
The acquisition of Selerant by Trace One marks a significant leap forward for process manufacturers and consumer-packaged goods (CPG) retailers by bringing forth one-of-a-kind, end-to-end product lifecycle management (PLM) and compliance solutions from an organization with a combined 30+ years of experience in these verticals.
Christophe Vanackère, CEO of Trace One, highlights the acquisition’s impact on enhancing operational agility for clients, which is crucial for accelerating product development. He states, “By seamlessly integrating the unique strengths of both companies, our PLM and compliance solutions create a unified pathway that encompasses every aspect of product development, from ideation and planning, raw material management, formulation and recipe development to distribution – with end-to-end compliance and quality management baked in.”
Regulatory compliance is one of the main focuses of this revamped PLM solution. As Vanackère points out, it’s a critical component in today’s global market. Clients often find themselves in a tight spot, trying to quickly launch new products while being entangled in the ever-changing regulatory web that covers the food and beverage, cosmetics and personal care, and specialty chemicals manufacturing and retail landscape. This web involves regulations on ingredients, additives, pesticides, and allergens. It gets even more complicated for businesses operating internationally, as each country and new market has its own set of rules and regulations.
In addition to PLM, Trace One offers a suite of compliance-focused solutions that empowers brands to safely and effectively launch new products.
Specialty chemicals, flavors & fragrances and cosmetic products must meet everchanging local, regional, and global safety data sheet (SDS) and labeling compliance demands to align with Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals (GHS)-based regulations. Trace One’s EHS compliance and SDS authoring solution accelerates hazard classification, SDS creation, and labeling in all major markets, providing a harmonized database of substance classifications and integrated regulatory content options. The solution stays current with worldwide GHS updates, facilitating quick calculations of the latest regulations.
In the past, the approach to compliance checks was mostly manual, which was not only risky but could also lead to significant setbacks. Non-compliance with market regulations could send a product back to the drawing board, causing costly and time-consuming revisions, as well as potentially deadly allergen labeling errors, which can lead to consumer illness, or even death. Trace One’s solutions aim to address these challenges, offering a more streamlined and efficient pathway for product development.
By harnessing the expertise of regulatory teams and integrated compliance tools, the holistic PLM and compliance solution ensures adherence to international standards in any market. This equips R&D and innovation teams with advanced tools to assess product formulas from the get-go, embedding compliance at the heart of the process.
This markedly reduces the cycles needed to achieve compliance and preemptively addresses potential issues that could emerge later, particularly during scale-up and supply chain engagement. In a field where expertise in compliance is scarce, this capability to rapidly innovate while ensuring product safety is a defining feature of the PLM solution in a fast-moving market.
Elaborating on this approach, Antoine Daviet, Chief Product Officer of Trace One, says, “What we are doing here is combining compliance and innovation. For us, compliance is not just a step in the process, but it’s really embedded in innovation. We have clients that follow a certain compliance by-design principle. Our tools help ensure their compliance standards are not just met but are an integral part of the innovation journey, upheld at every stage.”
This method gains particular importance against the backdrop of the food & beverages, cosmetics and personal care, and specialty chemical industries’ current climate, which sees a surge in the use of data-driven business intelligence and predictive analytics for swift market entry of new products. Trace One’s software solutions are strategically designed to leverage this trend. By enabling the analysis of historical sales data over periods ranging from 5 to 15 years, it facilitates the identification of previously successful products and aligning them with consumers’ evolving preferences and trends, to drive brand strategy and business goals forward and identify key risks and opportunities, so manufacturers and retailers can get safer products to consumers quicker.
In one instance, a leading infant formula manufacturer encountered challenges with the manual verification process for their highly regulated products. Ensuring compliance with diverse regulations and meeting age-specific nutritional requirements was a significant hurdle. In response, they turned to Trace One, to significantly streamline the formulation validation process, and provided tailored assessments for specific market requirements, which led to faster product development and formulations that met regulatory standards across multiple markets.
"For us, compliance is not just a step in the process, but it’s really embedded in innovation. We have clients that follow a certain compliance-by-design principle. Our tools help ensure their compliance standards are not just met but are an integral part of the innovation journey, upheld at every stage"
“This means they could devise a single formulation compliant with regulations across multiple countries, which previously had to be done separately because the client didn’t have our tool. As you can see, our PLM system is a significant value addition for our clients,” says Daviet.
Encouraged by such triumphs, Trace One is now propelling forward with significant investments in machine learning and AI technologies, recognizing the profound benefits they bring, particularly in automating compliance tasks. Its AI-driven tools can aggregate and interpret regulations from over 170 countries, processing and classifying this vast array of data to deliver it to clients in a usable and actionable format.
By making AI an integral component of its overarching product growth strategy, the newly evolved Trace One is poised to redefine the sectors of retail, consumer-packaged goods, and process manufacturing with a holistic, 360-degree approach to product lifecycle management.
About Trace One
Trace One is a global leader in PLM and compliance solutions within the process manufacturing and retail CPG space. With more than 30 years of industry expertise, we deliver innovative and scalable solutions that support the entire product manufacturing lifecycle and equip our customers to thrive in new markets. Serving more than 9,000 brand owners worldwide, Trace One is committed to delivering the best in every aspect of business, including solutions, data standardization and access, customer success and social and environmental responsibility.
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