Vaude’s strategic partnership with supply chain digitization platform Retraced has hit its stride.
The German outdoor gear purveyor said Tuesday that it has successfully integrated more than 120 suppliers and achieved an active supplier rate of 95 percent—all within a span of 12 months. This, Vaude said, has allowed it to engage more closely and efficiently with its upstream vendors in countries as disparate as China, Germany, Portugal and Vietnam, enabling more transparent and responsible procurement of its products.
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“We introduced Retraced to comprehensively digitalize supply chain management at Vaude,” Bettina Roth, head of quality management/CSR supply chain at Vaude, said in a statement. “It is crucial that not only quality and delivery reliability can be monitored, but that social and environmental aspects are also taken into account. With Retraced, we have found a solution to further develop our supply chain sustainably and thus achieve ever higher goals in our sustainability strategy.”
Digitizing supply chain management, Roth noted, will become increasingly important in light of laws that will be coming down the pike as part of the European Union’s Green Deal. She said that Vaude tapped Retraced because of the platform’s “bottom-up approach,” complete with a user-friendly interface that juggles certifications and audits, tracks the origin of materials and creates risk maps and profiles for individual partners “with a single click.”
All of this has “significantly” sped up and “professionalized” its administrative processes, according to Vaude. By automating its data collection and creating a centralized source of truth for information, the retailer says it has been able to avoid getting bogged down in back-and-forth emails and time-consuming data entry duties, saving resources and allowing employees to focus on more strategic projects such as standards development.
Roth said that the supplier integration occurred in stages, beginning with Vaude’s “most important suppliers” via “kick-off meetings, training and continuous dialogue” to ensure their active participation. Ideally, she said, a supplier enters its data into Retraced once, before sharing it with customers like Vaude, cutting back on manual work for everyone involved.
“Collecting data from the supply chain for our various reports such as the sustainability report, textile partnership progress report, etc., always caused us a lot of manual effort at the beginning of the year,” she said. “By automating processes and centralizing data management, resources can be used more efficiently to focus on strategic tasks.”
With the initial phase over with, Vaude wants to leverage Retraced risk management capabilities to perform comprehensive risk assessments at the factory level. Other plans include Corrective and Preventive Action, or CAPA, management and product traceability.
“We are proud to partner with Vaude, who are so deeply committed to sustainability and transparency in their supply chain,” Lukas Pünder, CEO of Retraced, said in a statement. “Vaude’s dedication to integrating Retraced speaks to their proactive stance towards a more sustainable future, and we will continue supporting them on this journey.”
