Product Design and Pre-Production Approval delivers a Web-enabled collaborative environment designed to support retailers who create private-label products. The product offerings will allow multilingual globally dispersed business teams to work together to create new products in real time.

The product offerings will capture information gathered during the concept development and product design phase at a single location. Retailers will be able to use this information to collaborate internally or with external business partners to finalize product specifications. Specifications will then be delivered to the sourcing organization to facilitate supplier selection. Once the supplier has been selected, the retailer will have the ability to manage pre-production approval activities. Industry standards and workflow management functionality will be employed to support the entire process.

Benefits to retailers include increased speed-to-market for new product introductions, better return on assets invested in development efforts, improved communication between collaboration partners and reduced errors and rework. Benefits to suppliers include simplification of communications through use of industry standards, reduced costs incurred to support retailers in design and pre-production processes, reduced administrative paperwork and fewer delays in launching products.