As we discussed previously, global product management and development should not drag your international strategy. While we identify regulatory compliance management as the biggest business challenge for a CPG organization developing products for international markets, multilingual product data management is a fundamental technological asset.
A global interface
An asset that your Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution must integrate. Although providing a global interface is crucial to facilitate the acceptance of the solution amongst international teams, it is not enough. Training and help material must also be available in the languages the solution supports. Global interface, manuals and user instructions allow everyone in your organization or corporation to access it and use it to its full potential.
Relies on multilingual data
However, to efficiently support your international activities, what you really need is multilingual data. Indeed, to sell your products in other countries, you can’t rely on literal translation as you can’t use whatever wording for the labelling. You have to use the accurate and compliant one. Therefore, your solution must support the right translation in wording and format for key values such as nutrition, risks, allergens or in measure units used (kilograms, pounds, percentage, …).
Compliance is not the only reason why you should have multilingual data. It procures additional support for your local teams as they can access the global portfolio and use ideas developed by other teams to start their own or adapt an already marketed product for a new country. And, don’t forget your customers, you may all speak English in your company but what about them?
That’s some of the few reasons why your PLM software must naturally embark multilingual data libraries. It is in these libraries that your teams- Marketing, R&D, Quality, etc.- will retrieve the source data to use in their projects. We are talking about product specifications, brief requirements, claims, ingredient names, etc.
Different local teams work on the same project but do not speak the same language? They are able to work in their local idioma while sharing an accurate vision of the product and project.
An already marketed product is exported abroad? All the technical information and documentation can be automatically generated in the language of the targeted market.
And offers many benefits for your CPG company
Wherever your NPD teams are on the globe and whatever their targeted market is, having a naturally multilingual software makes international NPD operations:
- More reliable. There are fewer errors due to mistaking ingredients for instance.
- Friendlier for teams. It is easier to find required data and there is no need to rely on personal translation skills.
- More collaborative. Teams geographically separated and speaking different languages are able to conjointly and efficiently develop a product.
Discover Aptean PLM Lascom PLM, our Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution successfully used by one of our key accounts to market their premium syrups in more than 120 countries.
