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Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

Fully integrated product specification and ingredient management

Boy and burger

The cornerstone of any quality management program is effective data management of your product specifications—from inception to approval, and every revision and variation thereafter.

CMX1's PLM solution empowers you and your team to create, control, manage, and track your finished and raw material product specifications, formulations, ingredients, and more.

Workflow-driven processes, task management, notifications, and supplier collaboration features can all be used to automate the creation and approval process—from the initial draft to finalized status. 

All your product information in a single solution.

Make quality
your secret ingredient

To achieve excellence, quality and safety must be part of your product design from the get-go. This requires accurate information and powerful data management capabilities. CMX1 equips you with the tools you need to innovate—bringing new products to market swiftly and with control. With features like these you ensure consistency, product compliance, and food safety over time.

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Diego Beamonte

“Our menu is diverse and we source from thousands of suppliers. It’s a tough problem to tackle and CMX was the right choice for us. With their platform, Burger King, Tim Hortons, and Popeyes have continued to aggressively scale, while maintaining control and oversight over supplier and product quality.”

Diego Beamonte Head of Quality Assurance for Restaurant Brands International
Elodie Thao Raleys-1

CMX1 for Grocery has taken what was once a largely manual process across multiple systems at Raley’s and enabled us to have a single solution with standardization and automation for how we manage our private label program. With plans to expand our offerings, we knew we needed a platform that allowed us to scale our management and monitoring practices across product quality and food safety, regulatory and supplier compliance, and ethical sourcing.

Elodie Thao Senior Food Safety and Quality Assurance Manager, Raley's
Diego Beamonte

“Our menu is diverse and we source from thousands of suppliers. It’s a tough problem to tackle and CMX was the right choice for us. With their platform, Burger King, Tim Hortons, and Popeyes have continued to aggressively scale, while maintaining control and oversight over supplier and product quality.”

Diego Beamonte Head of Quality Assurance for Restaurant Brands International
Elodie Thao Raleys-1

CMX1 for Grocery has taken what was once a largely manual process across multiple systems at Raley’s and enabled us to have a single solution with standardization and automation for how we manage our private label program. With plans to expand our offerings, we knew we needed a platform that allowed us to scale our management and monitoring practices across product quality and food safety, regulatory and supplier compliance, and ethical sourcing.

Elodie Thao Senior Food Safety and Quality Assurance Manager, Raley's

You + CMX1 = a winning formulation

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Simple to Comprehensive Product Specifications

Leverage either simple attachment-based specifications and/or comprehensive data-driven options:

  • CMX1's attachment-based option uses simpler authoring and approval workflows. Fill in header information, specify approved ingredients, and add as many attachments as needed.
  • Alternatively, use a forms-based approach that allows you to specify with greater detail all the information needed to manage specifications, formulations, and ingredients. Use different templates for product types including formulations, finished product standards, processing control points, storage, packaging, labeling requirements, attachments, and more.

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    Approve Suppliers for Production

    Your product commercialization processes may vary from simple to comprehensive. Whatever the case may be, CMX1 helps you to collect and evaluate all the necessary documentation and information before you approve a supplier.

  • Request a facility audit, nutritional and allergen information, certifications, product claims, product and packaging labels and graphics, product evaluations, country of origin, and Tier 2 supplier information if necessary.

  • All your requests, tasks, and statuses are easily managed and tracked in one place.

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    Full Lifecycle Management

    Workflow automation helps your team author and approve finished product and raw material specifications.

  • Collaboration tools allow you to share and track edits as you work with R&D, category managers, quality assurance, nutritionists, and suppliers.
  • A built-in common ingredient database means you can reuse formulations and automated weights and measures to improve accuracy and consistency.
  • Ensure ongoing product compliance by defining finished product standards, process control points, shelf-life requirements, and packaging.
  • Account for differing requirements according to brand, region, country, product category, risk, and more with specification templates.
  • Visual comparison tools allow you to manage revisions and variations according to specifications.
  • Automated record keeping allows full history tracking with date and time stamps.

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    Stay in Control

    Maintain control in the midst of ongoing change. No matter how you identify your products—fully automated specification numbering, GTIN, product IDs, external IDs—CMX1 gives you the tools you need to control and track updates over time.

  • Full revision and variation controls with automated communications and recertification workflows for impacted suppliers. CMX1’s task management and notifications ensure that everyone stays on track and nothing falls through the cracks.
  • All updates are automatically logged in record history, so changes are available for review at any time.
  • Visual comparison tools allow you to see the differences between specifications and formulations, as changes are made over time.
  • Workflow tracking allows you to see who is responsible for certain tasks and when they’re completed.

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    Ingredient Sourcing and Multi Tier Mapping

    Most of your risk is likely beyond your Tier 1 suppliers. Utilize CMX1's Ingredient Sourcing to identify, map, and track the country of origin and sources of ingredients used in your finished products.

  • Ensure you know the source and compliance status of your supplier's suppliers (Tier 2) and go beyond the normal "one up, one down" model for managing risk.

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    Nutrition and Allergens

    CMX1 automatically calculates nutritional values and generates accurate allergen declarations.

  • All data is available in the platform as well as XML output to inform other systems, websites, and displays in your locations.

    • CMX_ebook_5_key_questions_cover_small

    The 5 Key Questions Every Brand Should Ask

    Our free eBook brings together over a decade of experience working with brands including Burger King, Sonic Drive-In, and Hasbro. Without jargon, it guides the reader through the 5 most important SCQMS considerations and provides a list of specific questions to ask potential software partners, helping you to choose the best-fit system and partner for your company.

    Download ebook More resources

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    FAQ's

    You bring the questions, we'll provide the answers!

    • Can it be used for grocery chains and brands?

    • What does PLM stand for?

    • How does PLM work?

    • What is Product Lifecycle Management Software?

    • What Are the Benefits of A PLM System?

    • What are Legacy PLM Systems?

    • Why Do Businesses Need PLM?

    • What are the Stages in a Product’s Lifecycle?

    • What is Specification Management Software?

    • Is there a PDF I can download and share?

    Glad you asked — it sure can! Learn more about CMX1 for Grocery, here. Or visit our PLM solution page specifically for grocery brands, here.

    PLM stands for Product Lifecycle Management: it involves the entire process of managing a product as it moves through its different life stages—from creation, formulation, revision, and ultimately to discontinuation once it has reached the end of its useful life.

    PLM  starts with you creating a name for your product and deciding its purpose/target market, what should be in it (ingredients), where it should come from (facilities/vendors), and all other necessary requirements for making it and maintaining its integrity over time.

    PLM Management Software allows you to integrate and automate all your product management processes using a single digital platform. Ideally the PLM software you use integrates with your supplier management system, quality assurance monitoring system, and crisis management system.

    The main benefit of a PLM system is that it streamlines everything in the product commercialization process, thus making the steps more efficient. This optimized workflow process ultimately leads to increased profits by reducing errors and wastage, and by putting a safer, higher quality product on the market faster. 

    Legacy PLM Systems refer to outdated first-generation PLM or Product Development Management systems. Legacy PLM Systems reduce flexibility, limit collaboration, and waste valuable time.

    Businesses need PLM in order to effectively create and manage products, together with all other processes, such as recording product properties, ingredients, claims, changes), and managing and keeping track of vendors/aligned facilities. 

    The stages in a product’s life cycle are: 1) introduction, 2) growth, 3) maturation, and 4) decline.

    Specification Management Software allows you to manage product specifications across your entire supply chain digitally. It usually includes data-driven templates for product types, formulations, finished product standards, processing control points, attachments, and more. A major benefit of specification management software is that the information can be searched more easily rather than locked in a document.

    There sure is!

    Click here to open the module guide request form, enter your name and email, and we'll send a PDF version of the PLM Module Guide directly to your inbox.