Customer Profile
Our client is a major player in the food & beverage industry, headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The company operates across more than eight countries with a workforce of 950 people. With $450 million in annual revenue, the company serves internationally with a strong presence on both the European and North American markets and striving to meet increasing consumer and regulatory expectations around environmental responsibility.
The Challenge: Navigating the Labyrinth of Sustainability and Compliance
Before implementing Trace One PLM, the company confronted a fragmented product development ecosystem and numerous hurdles in managing sustainability-related products and packaging data siloed across departments. These challenges spanned regulatory compliance, environmental impact tracking, and operational inefficiencies:
- Tracking sustainability KPIs: monitoring water and energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and overall carbon footprint was complex and inconsistent due to fragmented data sources.
- Managing packaging waste and recyclability: quantifying waste generated from released products and evaluating packaging recyclability were largely manual processes, slowing down analysis and improvements.
- Plastic predominance: understanding the lifecycle and impact of plastic packaging, reducing its usage, and managing recycling challenges proved difficult without centralized insights.
- Regulatory pressure: new regulations, such as those addressing deforestation in Europe, combined with increasing consumer demand for transparency in ingredient sourcing, created added pressure.
- Siloed data and manual processes: relying on Excel spreadsheets and decentralized files made it nearly impossible to gain a single source of truth, undermining data accuracy, team performance, and reporting integrity.
Recognizing the operational and strategic risks posed by these obstacles, the company sought a future-proof solution to streamline processes, ensure compliance, and support long-term environmental goals and vision.
The Solution: An Integrated PLM Approach to Support Sustainability
The company partnered with Trace One to deploy a PLM system in order to centralize its product lifecycle data and empower teams with sustainability-driven decision-making tools. This end-to-end solution provides structure, consistency, and visibility across departments.
Key capabilities enabled by the solution included:
- Sustainability-by-design: product requirements could be embedded early in the development process to ensure all formulations supported the company’s environmental goals.
- Data-driven material selection: teams can evaluate ingredients and packaging based on environmental impact, recyclability, and compliance data—all stored in a single, structured system.
- Life Cycle Assessments (LCA): the company can now calculate and visualize environmental impact across sourcing, production, and disposal stages for each product.
- Process optimization: with accurate data, R&D can adjust recipes and processes to reduce water consumption, lower energy usage, and eliminate unnecessary waste.
- Regulatory reporting: automated documentation ensures efficient, accurate compliance with local and global regulatory frameworks, saving time and reducing risk.
Solution scope:
- Project Management: Standardized the New Product Development and Introduction (NPDI) workflow, as well as product change management processes.
- Formulation Suite: Allowed for sustainability-aligned recipes and process creation using tailored business rules.
- Regulatory: Enabled automated generation of compliance global documentation.
Implementation Approach:
The company followed an agile, hybrid implementation methodology, structured into three key phases:
Phase 1: focused on ingredient and packaging data governance, ensuring all specifications and lifecycle information are standardized and accessible.
Phase 2: rolled out formulation and recipe management and finished product development tools, aligning them with internal sustainability goals.
Phase 3: built robust sustainability KPI dashboards and compliance reporting capabilities.
The full deployment, including user acceptance testing and training, was completed in 10 months. Close collaboration with Trace One teams, and internal stakeholders ensured a smooth and effective rollout.
The Outcomes: Transforming Sustainability into a Competitive Advantage
Trace One PLM implementation had a profound and measurable impact across the organization. By transforming sustainability from a compliance obligation into a strategic advantage, the company is now positioned as a forward-thinking industry leader.
Key benefits achieved:
- Accelerated product innovation: with structured and centralized data, the company could reformulate and develop products faster, particularly those designed to meet environmental targets.
- Real-time visibility: key indicators such as waste output, water consumption, and carbon emissions are now accessible instantly, supporting better operational decisions and faster corrective actions.
- Regulatory excellence: compliance checks are now built into the development process, and reports can be generated and validated quickly, ensuring smooth market access and audit readiness.
- Proactive product strategy: the company shifted from reacting to market demands to proactively launching more products that meet consumer and regulatory expectations, shortening innovation cycles.
- Stronger brand equity: as a company visibly aligned with sustainability, it is now viewed as a credible and innovative leader in the food and beverage space.
Value Metrics (Before/After Implementation)
- Time-to-market: improved by at least 60%, enabling faster launches of reformulated and new products.
- Data accuracy: errors were reduced by approximately 80%, thanks to the centralized system and automated checks.
- Regulatory reporting: efficiency increased by 50–60%, dramatically reducing the time spent on compliance documentation.
- Cross-functional collaboration: improved alignment and transparency across R&D, regulatory, and sustainability teams.
👉 Ready to see how Trace One PLM can accelerate your innovation and sustainability goals?