5 Ways to Use Workspaces for Internal Collaboration on CPG Projects
Workspaces from TraceGains Gather® are a powerful collaboration tool but getting started can be overwhelming. Here are five reasons to use workspaces, followed by the corresponding features to maximize your experience:
1. Ingredient Research
Use Workspaces to organize research with a focus on a specific ingredient or ingredient category.
- Add ingredient varieties and potential suppliers carrying this ingredient from Marketplace searches.
- Add an ingredient watchlist from Intelligence to keep tabs on potential risk associated with that ingredient in its various forms.
- Use the ‘Add to Workspace’ feature on ingredients in Intelligence to pin details about the ingredient’s taxonomy, regulatory status, usage, and side effects.
- Upload any relevant files directly from your computer and then share your Workspace with a teammate or another department to facilitate collaboration and share your insights.
- Use comments to communicate back and forth with colleagues and collaborators.
2. New Product Development Research
Workspaces come in handy for the formulation process:
- Create a Workspace dedicated to early new product development research.
- Add a note with your early formula ideas and create folders to organize existing materials already collected.
- Use advanced filters in Marketplace search to find innovative ingredients and potential supplier or co-manufacturing partners – add those items and suppliers directly to your Workspace!
- Add a Watchlist to your Workspace so you’ll be alerted to any risk associated with the ingredients and suppliers being considered for this new product.
- For dietary supplement companies, use Intelligence to view rich data about dietary supplement ingredient regulatory status, usage, and side effects.
- Purchase the Networked Intelligence: Claims Management add-on to access science citations articles searchable by keyword or health topic to support claim substantiation. You can even add a Citations watchlist into your Workspace to monitor new articles related to a specific supplement or health topic.
- If you’re looking for an enterprise grade formula management tool that integrates directly with the TraceGains network, check it out here: Formula Management
3. Monitor at-risk ingredients and find alternative sources
Workspaces are a great tool for collaboration between regulatory and procurement teams. When regulatory identifies an at-risk ingredient or supplier, procurement needs to be informed immediately to efficiently find alternative sources.
- Create a workspace and add a watchlist and bookmarks from Intelligence around the ingredients and suppliers in your supply chain.
- Use the matching tool in Intelligence to map your own ingredients and suppliers to content in Intelligence.
- When high-risk alerts like recalls, failed inspections, or safety alerts pop up, share the workspace with your procurement team and use the comment feature to call attention to high-risk notifications. Procurement can then use the Marketplace to find new potential suppliers and add them to the workspace.
- After sending a request for documents, samples, or quotes, add a comment to your quality team to encourage them to review incoming responses from Marketplace requests.
4. Collect and organize claims management for dietary supplements and functional food
For companies developing or promoting dietary supplements and functional food products, Workspaces offer a collaborative space to manage projects based on ingredients and trending health topics.
- Search and filter among a database of PubMed articles to find scientific substantiation to support product claims. (Requires the Networked Intelligence: Claims Management add-on package).
- Add dietary supplement ingredients, health topics or articles directly into a Workspace to quickly organize content and access direct feeds of new relevant claims management information.
- Use the Marketplace search and filter capabilities to find real ingredients that meet your requirements.
- Add these items to your Workspace and share off to your procurement and quality teams to investigate further.
5. Manage cross-functional projects
Workspaces offer a flexible project management solution built specifically for teams across the food, beverage, and dietary supplement supply chain industry.
- Add and collect content found across TraceGains Gather™, like items & suppliers from Marketplace and alerts & feeds from Intelligence.
- Add freeform notes and load files directly from your computer or the Document Library.
- Organize with layered folders and different views.
- Invite users to join your Workspace as contributors or read-only viewers.
- Leave comments to alert colleagues in your TraceGains Gather™ group of updates or requests.
- Share across teams to react quickly to potential opportunities and risk.
With the new TraceGains Gather®, we have tools to serve many different departments within your organization from quality and documentation specialists to regulatory & compliance managers to R&D and Purchasing teams. Invite your collaborators to see how your efficiency improves toGATHER.