Trace One (traceone.com), a global leader in private label product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions for retailers, manufacturers and suppliers, announces the results of its “Private Label Product Lifecycle Management Collaboration”survey.The research finds that a majority of top, private label supply chain stakeholders in the United States attribute their productivity and cost efficiency to their ability to effectively share information with a global network of PLM collaborators.

Trace One conducted the proprietary research in November of 2013 by surveying private label executives from an array of industries and including manyFortune 500 brands. The“Private Label Product Lifecycle Management Collaboration”survey asked private label decision makers how effectively they collaborate with supply chain partners and what online or offline tools they use to communicate and share information. It also explored how collaboration impacts their businesses, and what they view as major collaboration challenges and areas of improvement in the year ahead. Overall, the respondents stated that collaboration has a direct and positive impact on cost savings, organization-wide productivity, and customer loyalty.

“This research reaffirms that collaborating effectively – and doing so through the use of online tools specifically designed for the private label PLM industry – enables retailers, manufacturers and suppliers to improve consumer confidence and time to market, while reducing costs,” says Jerome Malavoy, founder and CEO of Trace One. “As private label continues to expand, it’s important that organizations’ collaborative tools can adapt to those changes and simplify the influx of new information to ensure the uninterrupted development and delivery of safe, reliable private label goods.”

Details of the “Private Label Product Lifecycle Management Collaboration” research include:

• 93% of respondents reported their organization is more productive because of their ability to collaborate. In fact, nearly 40% of these respondents said their organizations are 30% or more productive because of collaboration
• 82% of respondents said better collaboration helps them offset costs associated with fluctuating or rising raw material prices, labor wages and fuel prices, which were determined to be retailers’ top market pressures according to the Deloitte 2012-2013 Private Label Sourcing Survey
• Half of the organizations who rated their collaboration as “excellent” collaborate through online tools created specifically for the product lifecycle process; 62% of those who rated their collaboration as “poor” or “fair” use offline tools
  • In total, 69% of respondents reported that their organization uses offline tools like Excel documents and email to collaborate, 32% use online tools created specifically for the product lifecycle process, and 23% use other online tools like Dropbox or Google documents
• “Cost control” is a top area of improvement for 54% of the organizations surveyed, followed by improved consumer confidence (42%) and improved time to market (40%)
• More than three-quarters of respondents said their customer adoption and loyalty improved last year; 78% attribute that improvement to better stakeholder collaboration
• The top three collaboration challenges are: stakeholder misalignment on common objectives (41%), incorrect specifications and ingredients (34%), and the need to protect proprietary information and shield best practices from competitors (32%)

For information about Trace One, its products and the private label industries it serves, visit www.traceone.com. To view or download the “Private Label Product Lifecycle Management Collaboration” infographic, click here.