Author: Paul Woodward, Senior Director, Retail Supply Chain Business
Product safety, availability, and quality are critical factors in building trust with consumers. Retailers must fulfill consumer demands for accurate labeling while simultaneously increasing speed to market. During Oracle Retail Cross Talk, I sat down with leaders in the field to discuss how an open, transparent, and collaborative network can help meet these needs.
Over the past 30 years, I've had the opportunity to work with some of the world's leading brands in developing solutions to enable the growth and protection of their private label portfolios. Our collaboration has enabled the sourcing and lifecycle management of millions of products over that time, growing private label share from zero to over 60% in some countries. This opened up collaboration across the entire retail supply chain with hundreds of thousands of participants, suppliers, and production facilities. And we have supported our retail partners to address regulations, consumer trends, market initiatives, like dietary claims, traceability, authenticity and fraud, labeling laws, transparency, and today, sustainability and the environment.
Understanding Consumer Behavior and Retail Market Concerns
As concerns about sustainability and the environment become ever more critical for brands and consumers, the processes of tracking and verifying product information to backup relevant claims, known as brand compliance, becomes more complex.
"Customers are demanding to know more and more about their products, but they want to know that they can trust the information that they get, and they want to be able to have confidence in all the information about products that they get," explained Karin Carstensen, Scientific & Regulatory Affairs Manager of South Africa's Woolworths, a textile and food retailer.
Sustainable food specialist and food technologist Sarah Blanchard discussed the challenges this presents for retail and private label leaders tasked with managing this at a practical level. "They want to have a deeper knowledge about their products; they need transparency in their supply chains, they need the information at their fingertips. Retailers are making bold commitments; there is a lot of work to do to engage suppliers, and a lot of that is to do with having data and good technology systems," Blanchard explained. "You can make those commitments, but they will need to be able to get information from the supply chain."
Fighting Retail Supply Chain Complexity, Ensuring Accuracy
What Blanchard describes presents a formidable challenge, tasking brands with gathering data from the field, the farm, and logistics systems, not to mention ingredient and raw material providers and processors. Doing this effectively calls for a single source of information that provides visibility and that retailers can trust. "It's great to have information, but we need to have the same information in all places, and therefore we need a single reliable source for that information," explained Carstensen.
Beyond products on store shelves, product information is increasingly a boardroom matter.
"Investors are starting to use this," stated Blanchard. For retail leaders, this presents the need to publish sustainability reports, which pose equally daunting data demands. "With visibility on the product attributes, you can see the sustainability issues for certain categories, so you can prioritize and set targets for improvements and to track them. When you have got all that information available at your fingertips, it makes this reporting so much better."
Finding a Retail Solution
With increasing pressure on leaders within retail organizations to verify, communicate and report on all manner of metrics behind their products, product data management becomes a critical tool for success. "With Oracle Retail Brand Compliance, we capture all of our specifications and our supplier audits in Brand Compliance," said Carstensen. "It's a single site with all the data. Because we've got the single source of information, we know that we've got trust in the final claim that's being made on the product, whether it's online or on physical packaging, because that has been pulled all the way through from a single source of the truth."
Whole Foods' Private Label Business Operations Global Quality Assurance team leader Ashley Bias concurred.
"The technology in Brand Compliance has helped us to re-imagine how our teams collaborate and work with each other, but also with our suppliers. This collaboration is so important when we're gathering the information and processing it to make sure that we have accurate data about our products, which then allows us to continue to be confident that we're promoting sustainable products and products with the right dietary claims that meet Whole Foods Market quality standards."
Putting tools in the hands of retailers themselves to help them look at ways in which they can improve has led to innovation and discovery. Technology is helping retailers solve the new challenges presented by growing focus on the environment, sustainability, and other concerns, while also paving the way for growth in areas like private label. With an open, transparent, and collaborative network of suppliers and retailers working together, there's no limit on what they can achieve.