Gartner’s PPSM Market Guide Analysis: Safeguarding Your Brand Through Digital Processes

The Gartner Market Guide is a tool which allows business leaders to align their future plans to an emerging market. Their analyses are conducted and updated every two years, focusing on specific technology industries.

These guides provide advice to transform your business in the digital world; curating market-leading data and actionable insights for business optimisation and transformation. Gartner generates customised information delivered by experts, to help challenge conventional thinking and kickstart innovation. They set the gold standard for industry-specific best practices, fuelling business growth and digital enterprise.

Their September 2022 guide on packaging and product specification management (PPSM), focusing on software and services which effectively address challenges to utilising and analysing data, explored how important it is to safeguard your brand, and how effectively that can be achieved through digital processes.

“These applications help ensure brand identity and quality, even when manufacturers introduce product and packaging variants that must comply with differing local preferences and market regulations.”

Specification data is critical when brand owners outsource manufacturing to suppliers in different markets, when the priority is to maintain brand identity, ensure regulatory compliance and accuracy.

Raw materials and recipes for specific food and beverage brands may change, depending on local resources, so having the software to manage specifications in a ‘widely accessible standard platform’ ensures higher accuracy and efficiency in production. Equally, complying with legislation and local regulations is safeguarded by these data-driven processes.

“The sustainable packaging legislative landscape has driven an urgent need for organizations to identify solutions and practices for packaging specification management to achieve sustainability compliance.”

This makes packaging and sales data a priority for finance, tax, and risk departments. PPSM data is used for different projects, such as food and beverage branding, to assist in:

• Cost optimisation
• Graphics development (storing artwork on a shared cloud system)
• Tracking and managing changes
• Transportation efficiency
• Quality improvements

“The packaging specification management marketplace is still nascent, although the packaging industry globally is valued at over $1 trillion, and very few industries or organizations operate without utilizing inbound or outbound packaging.” 

4Pack’s PPSM applications provide a level of safeguarding that manual processes simply cannot; addressing specific challenges caused by ever-changing regulations and legislature, which in turn benefits the businesses we work with.