TraceGains’ Supplier Compliance and Supplier Impact applications identify how individual suppliers affect finished-goods yield, quality, profitability, customer satisfaction, or any other downstream outcome, giving companies new tools to evaluate their supplier base on much more than just price and on-time delivery.  The company was recently awarded two new patents relating to its core technology, connecting “upstream activities” to “downstream outcomes” across different companies in any supply chain allowing companies to understand suppliers’ true impact. These new patents increase to fourteen the TraceGains’ patent portfolio for its cross-enterprise solutions and technology engine, and both broaden and deepen the range and scope of previously issued patents.

The first new patent enables the ability to normalize and exchange upstream and downstream attribute data among independent systems in different companies, as well as identifying location and event data to help track a product or ingredient in a supply chain and to improve product quality. The second patent revolves around the ability to analyze received upstream data for the purpose of automatically certifying whether a product satisfies a product marketing claim such as whether or not it is counterfeit, whether or not it has been sustainably produced, or any other product marketing claim.

 “Many companies receive detailed ingredient information from their suppliers that they then store in paper or electronic filing cabinets, essentially collecting dust,” said Gary Nowacki, CEO of TraceGains. “By turning this data from each company in a supply chain into actionable information, our customers not only automate their QA procedures, they also evaluate their suppliers in a whole new light allowing them to understand better each supplier’s true impact.”

In combination, both patents solidify the ability of TraceGains’ SaaS-delivered Supplier Compliance and Supplier Impact applications to immediately deliver a positive return-on-investment.

Staying on top of suppliers and their audit status and other key information is time-consuming and costly. Risk from an out-of-compliance supplier may be even more costly. Up-to-the-minute information about suppliers is critical to insuring safe, saleable, and consumable goods. Increasingly food companies must learn how to:

• Automatically stay informed on suppliers' audit statuses on a continuous basis.

• Receive instant notifications when suppliers' audits, insurance certifications, and any other compliance items are due to expire.

• Link lab data to suppliers' shipped lots and continuously compare results.

• Automatically digitize Certificate of Analysis data for easy retrieval and analysis.

• Proactively manage risk with a system that illuminates and predicts risk for each supplier.

These Supplier Compliance and Supplier Impact services ensure that food manufacturers can streamline supplier audit data, and at the same time leverage these same data for lean continuous business improvement.  The web-delivered Supplier Compliance and Supplier Impact solutions help Quality and Strategic Sourcing departments simultaneously reduce costs while improving quality – automatically. Food and beverage makers, restaurant chains, nutraceutical manufacturers, and any company challenged with raw material or ingredient variability can quickly identify how individual suppliers and raw materials affect product outcomes such as customer satisfaction, profitability, yield, and quality.

By achieving 100% actionable visibility on all incoming Certificates of Analysis, often before product receipt, companies can move to exception-based management, allowing staff to focus on higher-value tasks such as advanced quality control, strategic sourcing, proactive supplier management, and better customer service.  Suppliers are continuously evaluated and rank-ordered on new business-critical KPIs that go way beyond the traditional measures of cost and on-time delivery. This actionable intelligence can then be quickly leveraged for supply chain and ingredient optimization, as well as proactive risk mitigation across supply chains.  By automatically reducing ingredient variability, finished goods are more easily and cost-effectively produced, while the cost of poor quality is significantly reduced. Charge-backs and stock-outs are kept to a minimum, while purchasing and negotiating power with suppliers is increased.

TraceGains (www.tracegains.com) is headquartered near Denver, CO, USA, with direct and partner offices throughout North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia.  The company is widely recognized as the SaaS (software as a service) leader in helping companies reduce costs and improve product quality-automatically.  Food & Beverage, Quick Service Restaurant Chains, Life Sciences, Chemicals, and related industries can leverage the Supplier Compliance and Supplier Impact applications to eliminate manual certificate of analysis (CoA) review, automatically reject shipments that are not compliant with critical business rules, and rank-order suppliers based on yield, quality, finished-good profitability, customer feedback, or any other downstream outcome.

Thomas R. Cutler is the President & CEO of Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based, TR Cutler, Inc, (www.trcutlerinc.com). Cutler is the founder of the Manufacturing Media Consortium of three thousand five hundred journalists and editors writing about trends in manufacturing.  Cutler is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, Online News Association, American Society of Business Publication Editors, Committee of Concerned Journalists, as well as author of more than 400 feature articles annually regarding the manufacturing sector.  Cutler is also the developer of lean technology C.E.O (Continuous Experiential Optimization). Cutler can be contacted at trcutler@trcutlerinc.com.