How the solution ensures material integrity preservation?
CMC is comprised of Commissioning, the Digital Chain of Custody, and PO Reconciliation. During each of these steps, and under each transaction (Inbound, Production and Outbound), the solution conducts a series of validations between different sets of data to guarantee the material integrity preservation.
A validation is a test done automatically on the platform to verify a specific information about a product, a fabric, a supplier, a quantity etc. They control for consistency between two different sources of data.
Therefore, to run all the necessary validations, the TrusTrace platform needs to access and gather different sets of data. This includes data coming from the brand information systems (Master Data), data coming from certification documents (like SCs and TCs) and data manually recorded by the suppliers.
Master Data: Data from the brands’ systems
Types of Master Data
Master Data is data coming from the information system of the brands. This information concerns different aspects of garment manufacturing.
How Master Data is collected
When a brand onboards on the TrusTrace platform, Master Data information must be recorded through APIs. Details of the APIs will be shared with the brand during the onboarding process.
Data from Certificates
When the Digital CoC is built, the validations often rely on data from certificates. The certificates can guarantee different product characteristics depending on their type.
Today, the TrusTrace platform mainly uses standards certificates, that guarantee that a certain lot of material or batch of products complies with a specific standard. There are two types of standards certificates: Scope Certificates and Transaction Certificates (defined in Introduction).
Workflow in TrusTrace:
A SC is uploaded when a supplier is onboarding on the platform and records its facilities, and a TC is uploaded within 2 weeks after the transaction it certifies happened in real life. The TC digitally imitates the physical flow of goods and materials.
When a SC is uploaded on the platform (during supplier onboarding), a series of validations is conducted to check its validity and its consistency with the brand master data.
Manually Recorded Data
While running the CMC solution, at different steps of the process, the suppliers will have to manually record data. This data will be tested against master data from the brand or data from certificates in certain validations. This occurs at different steps:
Manually Recorded Data | Commissioning | Digital CoC | |
Editable TC fields | Production Transaction | Outbound Transaction | |
Context |
When uploading a TC on the platform, a supplier can edit some data fields, including lot data by splitting a lot in several smaller lots. In this modification stage, some validations will occur to ensure for instance that no material has been artificially created. |
When a production transaction is recorded on the platform by a supplier, data points will be filled in regarding the input and output of the production process but also the material composition etc.
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When recording an outbound transaction, the supplier will enter information about the shipment. |
List of Validations
In this section all the validations that can be made on the platform at each step of the CMC execution will be listed and detailed. These validations can be considered as bricks that constitute the Digital Chain of Custody. They guarantee the preservation of the integrity of the certified material at each transaction of each supplier / Tier and thus for the whole supply chain.
Each PO reconciliation situation will come with a specific combination of validations and transactions detailed in the following chapter.
A validation is a test done automatically in the TrusTrace platform to verify a specific information about a product, a fabric, a supplier, or a quantity. This verification often consists in checking if there is a match between two sets of data among the data sources described before (master data, certificate data and recorded data).
Validations can either pass or fail. In case of failure, the system will display an error message, but for some validations that are the most critical, a failure will require an approval from the brand Liaison Office. For most of the validations, brands can choose between different failure workflows depending on their needs.
Validations are usually designed to happen at a specific stage of the CMC process, information about the tier of the supplier and the transaction at which it occurs can be included in the description of the validation.
Validations are color coded by the topic that they tackle.
Categorization of Validations
