Mise au Green and certificate management

Need

Mise au Green offers a wide range of products, which translates into a diversified supplier base (activities, geographical distribution). The brand therefore needs a traceability tool adapted to complex production chains, and which can deal with the associated supplier base management issues.

In addition, all the brand's products are Oeko-Tex Standard 100 certified. In practical terms, this means that each year Andréa must collect and centralize proof of compliance with the label for all the components of the products to be labeled.

This is a laborious manual process which, before using Trace For Good, required around two months' work for each collection (listing missing certificates, contacting and then regularly contacting suppliers to collect documents, preparing the summary, etc.).

As the project manager needed to free up her time to carry out other tasks, Mise au Green asked Trace For Good to automate this document management.

Solution : Trace For Good's advanced certification management module

To meet its customers' needs as closely as possible, Trace For Good has worked with Mise au Green to develop a document management automation module to help them label their products.

This module automatically collects the relevant documents according to the certifications chosen by the brand. Business rules specific to each standard have been integrated into the Trace For Good platform, and each supplier is guided through the process of filing scope and transaction certificates associated with the standards that concern them.

For example, for Oeko-Tex Standard 100-certified products, we collect scopes certificates for each component. Suppliers are automatically invited to upload these certificates to their portal.

Our OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology then enables us to extract information from the deposited documents (name and address of the certified factory, certification level, license number), and check their validity. With OCR, there's no need for the supplier or the person in charge of certificate management to enter this data!

The data is then centralized and synthesized, and can be extracted for direct transfer to the relevant organizations, without reprocessing.

In Andréa's case, she can transfer the summary of certificates collected via Trace For Good directly to OETI - Institut fuer Oekologie, Technik und Innovation GmbH - the official representative of Oeko-Tex based in Austria.

Results

From their space, Mise au Green teams can now, for each product, have a real-time view of the certificates collected by component, and identify missing certificates at a glance.

Certificate requests and reminders to suppliers are automated, to relieve the certification teams of the numerous email round-trips required to obtain all the documents.

Teams at Mise au Green save considerable time in document management, and can instantly identify non-cooperating suppliers.

Next steps

Today, Trace For Good enables Mise au Green to manage the Oeko-Tex Standard 100 certification of its products.

The brand now wants to go one step further and manage the transition of its products to 100% organic cotton. We'll be working with our partner to help them achieve label compliance.

Trace For Good's strength? Our tech expertise combined with our understanding of our customers' business and industry needs.

Our customers benefit from the operational excellence and productivity gains offered by the tool, and from our support in their CSR drive towards the highest standards of transparency and responsibility.