Celebrating the greatest innovations in retail technology

Operated by- Retail Week ¦ WORLD RETAIL CONGRESS – London 13th Sept, 2018

We are excited to announce that Track Record Global (TRG) has been shortlisted by the Tech.AWARDS for its ground-breaking Trackvision software for Product Technical File (PTF). This software service does exactly what it says on the tin – enabling retailers and their suppliers to work together in an efficient and fully collaborative manner to capture regulatory and corporate compliance product data; making it readily available to concerned parties.

TRG’s industry leading approach ensures that suppliers in over 50 countries know what evidence documents must be made available and by when, so that their products can be traded legally. Once uploaded, the evidence documents can be immediately assessed by TRG and made available for a rapid final validation by those buying the goods.

Using this software, TRG’s clients have saved millions of pounds. They have redeployed highly skilled technical staff, who were formerly administering test certificates, but who can now apply their significant technical expertise to product design and improvement.

Suppliers who were formerly ignorant of the test certificates to provide, now have clear instructions on exactly what’s required; when requirements change and when the test certificates are about to expire. TRG consistently supports all suppliers by both online and off-line methods.

The outcome is that no products are shipped prior to compliance being fully demonstrated; all compliance evidence is available for up to 10 years after products have been removed from sale; no supplier is left not understanding exactly what evidence they need to deliver; and the regulatory authorities can have immediate access to evidence of compliance when required.

What’s coming next? The world never stands still and TRG has no intention of resting on its laurels.  During Q1, 2019 TRG will release Trackvision’s new supply chain visualisation system which will map key supply chain characteristics (such as ‘legality’ or ‘no contribution to deforestation’) for timber, cotton and leather.

Also in 2019 TRG will launch its ‘Monitored Pre-Shipment Inspection Service (MPSI)’ which promises to slash the cost of PSIs by over 50% and completely disrupt the old and tired approach. Watch this space!

~ Frank Miller, TRG Managing Director

Now there’s a cheery Christmas thought for you all!

It is not all doom and gloom though, there are encouraging indications that the tide is turning, perhaps too slowly, but turning nonetheless. Governments, businesses and consumers are increasingly aware of the environmental consequences and cost of our current economic model.

This is leading to all sorts of innovation and creativity being used to improve the way we do business and grow our economies sustainably. For example, the recent boom in renewable energy (renewables provided nearly 30% of UK’s power between April and June 2017) or the transition that many businesses are making to circular business models (Accenture research indicates that the circular economy could bring $4.5tn in benefits by 2030).

Making these necessary changes can be a daunting prospect for businesses and is often perceived to cost a lot of money. At Track Record Global (TRG) we provide our customers with the practical support to realise and implement sustainable supply chain strategies. This in turn saves money and helps deliver safer, more sustainable products quickly.

It can be all too easy to focus on the negative impacts of our lives and the economies that support them, but this doesn’t help much in terms of solving the challenges we face (it’s also not at all in keeping with the festive spirit)! At TRG we like to look at things positively and work with our customers to help innovate and implement the changes needed to ensure businesses remain competitive and successful into the future.

~ Max Hargreaves (TRG Account Manager)

The principles of good customer service – our BEST philosophy:

• Bespoke – providing a sensitive, secure and personalised approach that understands your business’ needs.
• Empowering – we will help you optimise your own internal compliance procedures and help improve the efficiency and profitability of your company.
• Supportive – we are on your side. We understand the many competing demands on your time and make ourselves available when you need us, wherever you may be in the world.
• Transparent – we take the time to explain our services and procedures, making sure you understand what is required at all times

Our teams collaborate closely and share their intellectual and creative resources. Trackvision, our internet platform, securely integrates millions of records in an easy-to-access format. Our specialist IT team is able to adapt our services to emerging compliance trends so that we can meet the demands of our diverse customers. Our team of dedicated assessors combine their in-depth knowledge of compliance assessment with unparalleled experience of the increasing complexity of global regulation. All of this information and expertise is accessible to our customer service advisors allowing them to remain informed and responsive to your needs.

Good customer service demands a global commitment

A twenty-first century consumer is hyper-connected through means such as social media. With this comes a growing awareness and concern about the ethical and environmental ramifications retail and construction can have. Our approach allows us to securely gather, assess and report information instantly. It also minimises our travel-related carbon footprint – which is a bonus for us and the planet!

Ultimately, our approach to customer service is designed to demonstrate the benefits and value of cleaner, greener and more sustainable supply chains. Through self-certification and sustainable sourcing, suppliers can reduce overheads and improve the efficiency of their operations. We believe that such incentives are the best way to drive positive environmental change and encourage the use of sustainable supply chains throughout the market.

~TRG Customer Service team

(Image courtesy of cooldesign at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

Machine learning is a hot topic in the technology sector and its applications continue to change the way business is done. By analysing patterns and consistencies in a “teaching set” of data, machine learning can be used to solve many problems without (or with very little) human supervision. Machine learning has increasingly been proven to have many useful functions in our day-to-day lives including: data security, creating algorithms for investment banking, and predicting consumer trends.

Applying pattern analysis on a teaching set of accredited certification can enable effective machine validation of downstream evidence. This means non-compliant or erroneous documentation can easily be flagged, investigated and actioned by a compliance assessor or technical manager.

Another interesting application is Handwriting Recognition (HWR). The use of technology to interpret handwritten input from scanned paper sources, touch-screens and photographs into a digital medium. HWR is not new, as early as the 1980s the technology was being incorporated into the first Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), as a replacement for the keyboard (something which never took off).

As many will remember commercial PDAs tended to be tedious and slow to accurately recognise handwriting (who remembers the Apple Newton…). HWR has made huge strides since then, the technology is now much more readily available and usable in all sorts of modern day scenarios.

Could HWR now be effectively utilised in the compliance industry?

One example could be the translation of hand-written text in documentary evidence used in the supply chain. Historically, documents such as felling permits, transport documents and invoices often contain hand-written text in foreign languages. This is difficult to review, translate and convert into a machine readable format.

With the aid of HWR, the hand-written text can be converted into machine readable text and easily translated to the assessor or technical managers’ chosen language. This in turn leads to a speedier assessment turnaround, reduced errors, costs and enriched digital assessment data.

In an increasingly connected world of international trade, language barriers are a prevailing problem. At TRG we believe using machine learning techniques such as HWR could be a major step in enhancing the efficiency of supply chain management for the businesses we work with.

~ Jacob Nowell, Senior Developer

The inspection companies have been hugely successful and have grown to employ thousands of auditors, located in hundreds of offices around the world, making many millions of pounds sterling, USD dollar and Euros profit over the years. Their auditors are highly trained and the inspection businesses hold a wide and comprehensive range of accreditation’s – giving them the right and credibility to audit against specific process and product standards.

Their business models are largely built around a simple metric – auditor utilisation. They need to have those auditor boots on the ground, doing fee earning work for a specific percentage of each auditor’s working week. If their auditors are fee earning for that key % of unit time, then all the overheads and salaries are met; well over that breakeven % and the profits are significant. To date they have been very successful at making money – but is that well-tapped source of revenue drying up?

They’ve diversified into owning and operating test houses. These have served as an important revenue source as the auditing cash-cow started to stagger somewhat under the pressure of commoditisation.  But it’s still there – munching away at suppliers and retailers margins.

So how do the inspection bodies lubricate the wheels of international business? And why is that model under threat?

In the days of old they delivered the transparency on the quality (and existence) of the product or service being purchased from a distant vendor, that perhaps spoke a different language, was from a different culture and had a different way of doing business. The inspection bodies provided the bridge across the divide.

But a quantum change is coming – delivered by the Internet. The Internet suddenly has the potential to provide that visibility down supply chains that was formerly the reason-to-be for the inspection bodies. Language barriers are shrinking and will be virtually non-existent in a few years. Suddenly the boots-on-the ground and auditor utilization business model looks more and more shaky.

Can the inspection body juggernauts change such a fundamental plank in their business structure in ‘Internet’ time? Time will tell…

~ Frank Miller, Managing Director

Take the supply chain for example.  Most companies feel they do not know nearly enough about their suppliers: where they get their raw materials from, their work practices and those of their sub-suppliers, or the safety of their products.  Any attempt to come to grips with all these issues at the level of individual supplier and individual product takes time effort and money, which impacts delivery times and bottom lines.  Frankly, most firms do this work badly or not at all and hope they won’t get caught out.

For suppliers meanwhile complying with the demands of each of its customers separately is equally time consuming frustrating and distracting. Is ensuring compliance and sustainability a source of competitive advantage in today’s markets or is it just the minimum common denominator consumers and governments now demand from all the companies they deal with?   Wouldn’t it be much better to check out all suppliers in a systematic and holistic way before placing an order?   Surely suppliers would be willing to cooperate in providing the necessary assurances if they only had to do so once for many customers.

At TRG we like to think we can make the market more efficient and more responsible.    We’d like to stimulate a discussion not just between retailers and their suppliers but between suppliers and other suppliers and between retailers and other retailers, all with the aim of making managing supply chains more transparent, more responsive, and less costly.  If you want to be part of this conversation let us know.

~ Rene Olivieri, Chairman

Opaque Supply Chains – where the does the risk lie?

Dr Steve New (Saïd Business School, Oxford, UK) gave an insightful presentation which highlighted the different types of risk that exist – both tangible (health and safety etc.,) and intangible (sustainably and ethically sourced etc.’) – and that raw material provenance was becoming increasingly important. But he also said that there had yet to be evidence of a paradigm shift in the thinking of the majority of consumers and businesses. Steve outlined his 3 ‘laws’ of supply chains; firstly that businesses’ culpability for supply chain ethics cannot be less than their influence/engagement with supply chain quality; secondly that businesses that are ignorant of tier (n) have no defense if tier (n) knows about them; and thirdly that a business can’t manage supply network data with an information system designed simply for 1st Tier suppliers.

Shrinking in-house technical resources – coping strategies

Sarah Boyle (Spring Chicken Ltd and formerly Mothercare plc) gave a close and detailed account of how Mothercare plc had grown online sales from virtually nothing (2006 – 2007) to over £10m worth in the first year but with no reduction in product quality and the management of risk. At the time they calculated that they needed 3.5 extra technicians for compliance checking for online pushchair category alone – knowing that other categories were to follow. They managed the big increase in risk by outsourcing risk assessment and management to Track Record Global, enabling their technologists to focus on new and enhanced product designs.

Light touch, transparent approaches for factory audits and PSI

Chris Riley (Verisio Ltd) is highly experienced in running highly successful on-site 3^rd party inspection companies. He stated that there were still many product quality issues associated with less well informed suppliers – particularly where there is a limited understanding of EU quality requirements and how rapidly they are updated. In a world where risks are steadily increasing 3rd party inspections of factories; products; and shipments should be increasing. Budgetary constraints, however, make this impossible. A risk based approach, therefore is required so that quality checking can be focused where risk to product quality is greatest and suppliers need most assistance. He outlined some innovative protocols that were most efficiently implemented using the new generation of online systems – such as Track Record Global’s.

End-to-end risk management – the next revolution in product quality management

Fiona Horsnell (Track Record Global) highlighted the fact despite the remorseless and accelerating increase in connectivity, so many businesses still manage product and supplier quality using massively inefficient (and more worryingly ineffective) paperwork approaches and excel spreadsheets. There is, however, a technical revolution just around the corner.  Track Record Global’s vision is one where suppliers have an increasing role in managing internal quality but their ‘live’ performance in quality management terms and the quality of their products is made ‘transparent’ to their customers. Transparency is achieved by the use of online quality centered IT systems – enabling the building of complex but inclusive databases built on product quality and supplier performance reporting. These big data sets are structured around the quality continuum (from product sealing to product technical file to returns and recalls) and shine an immediate light on where buyers and technicians need to focus their effort. This is what TRG delivers. Our Service cuts costs; significantly improves efficiency and effectiveness; and delivers a range of new and exciting benefits to buyers – building Trust Through Transparency.

Responsible companies have always been concerned about what makes up the products that they sell to their customers and how those ingredients or components got there. What are the risks of ‘bad things’ being included in traded goods or ‘bad things’ happening as they were included? How far up the supply chain do you need to go in order to quality all the risks?

Methods for focusing due diligence efforts

The Modern Slavery Act 2015, and the European Union Timber Regulation 2013 are examples of regulations that require companies to take a serious look at the entire supply chains that provide the goods delivered to their tier 1 suppliers. They specifically reference the need for businesses to demonstrate that they have carried out an appropriate level of due diligence.

Due diligence is the name of the game – with the effort put into the due diligence exercise being proportionate to the perceived product/supplier related risks.

So some sort of prequalification of risk is needed before a business starts their due diligence. This is commonly based on:

Type of product (i.e., hover board = high vs bag of nails = low)

Country of origin (i.e., Central African Republic = high vs Sweden = low)

Type of raw material (i.e., tropical hardwood from natural forest = high vs plantation grown softwood = low)

This makes it is broadly possible for each business sector to come up with a crude set of supply chain risk rating rules, but this does rely on a general understanding of the structure – from top to bottom – of each supply chain. Using this model companies know where to focus their due diligence efforts.

Beyond tier 2 suppliers

Once a business has identified a high risk supply chain – then how is the degree of risk associated with the products and suppliers quantified?

Currently it seems that on the ground audits of tier 2 factories (and for the tiers above) is how risk in the supply chain is being qualified. The large businesses at the market facing or near market facing are paying huge amounts to carry out their due diligence, or to 3^rd parties to do it on their behalf.

No new approaches seem to have been adopted over the last decade. Due diligence is either by blanket questionnaire or on-the-ground audits – with questionnaire filling happening on-site by the auditors.

A new approach is needed

Online systems provide the opportunity to provide increased transparency and openness with suppliers taking more responsibility for provision of appropriate information. IT based systems are currently not being used to their full potential. There will always be a role for feet on the ground, but this ultimate means of gathering information needs to be used selectively and as a last resort rather than as standard practice. It needs to be used in support of IT based approaches.

Slaves in the supply chain

Under the Modern Slavery Act 2015, every company with a turnover of more that £36m and a footprint in the UK, has to produce an annual statement outlining what it is doing to identify and address potential slavery issues in its supply chain.

While compliance is easy to measure, many companies are failing to adequately review and account for their level of exposure.

The great thing is that determining whether a company is compliant or not, is relatively straightforward and there are a range of expert businesses – such as Verisio (www.verisio.com) – that are capable of providing advice and identifying risks of non-compliance.

Track Record Global considers that this Act should, over time, have a significant positive impact on reducing slavery in product supply chains that deliver into the UK. It will also support the increasing trend of ‘supply chain transparency’ where the supply chains that products travels down, are highlighted to the end consumer as part of the risk assessment/demonstration of quality due diligence process.

Button batteries

Surgeons are warning of the potential deadly risks posed to young children that swallow button batteries. If accidentally swallowed, the small, round batteries can get lodged in the oesophagus and burn a hole through its lining.

London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital has seen a big increase in cases in the past year. Surgeon Kate Cross said: “Button batteries should be treated like poison and kept out of reach of children.”

In Australia action is being taken. Woolworths, Coles, Aldi, Energiser Australia and Officeworks are among major retailers who have adopted a new voluntary industry code designed to reduce the number of Australian children killed and injured after swallowing button batteries.

The Industry Code for Consumer Goods that Contain Button Batteries has recently been developed by a range of businesses, with support from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and state regulators.

“Children under the age of five are at the greatest risk,” ACCC Deputy Chair Delia Rickard said.

“Once loose, children can easily mistake the batteries for lollies. This new Code is an important step towards ensuring children cannot access the batteries, thereby reducing the risk that they will swallow them.”

The resulting industry code is intended to guide manufacturers, retailers, importers and online suppliers in their supply and use of button batteries, highlighting that in many cases, deaths and injuries “may have been prevented” if the device had a secured battery enclosure, or caregivers had known to store and dispose of new button batteries securely out of reach of children.

In order to comply with the code, retailers and manufacturers must ensure products that require button batteries are designed so that the batteries are not accessible by young children.The product must have a battery compartment that is secured, with a screw or bolt, or it must have a compartment that requires two or more independent and simultaneous actions to remove its cover.

The code also requires information to be available at the point of sale, in a store and online, indicating that the product requires button batteries and that they are hazardous to young children.Retailers are encouraged to use child-resistant packaging marked with a warning, and to consider the height at which button batteries and products containing button batteries are displayed in stores.

Track Record Global considers that the good work done by Woolworths, Coles, Aldi, Energiser Australia and Officeworks on the voluntary code should be adopted around the world.