How a Leading Fashion Group Automated Certificate Management Across Hundreds of POs Monthly

The company is a leading European fashion group operating multiple mid-market brands across Europe. Dedicated to excellence in material quality and certification, the group sources from hundreds of production facilities around the world, delivering multiple seasonal collections annually. That commitment to quality means being able to validate and prove it — to consumers and retailers alike — with verified certificates at product level.

Story Highlights

• 1 FTE saved through automation
• Thousands of certificate requests fully automated
• Hundreds of purchase order requests validated monthly
• Confident product claims backed by evidence

Before TrusTrace, the company’s entire certificate management workflow ran on spreadsheets and email. One full-time employee was responsible for tracking incoming supplier certificates, manually extracting all required data fields by retailers, cross-checking them against purchase orders (POs), and compiling submission-ready reports for retailers — every month, across hundreds of POs.

The volume was relentless. Each season brought a new wave of POs, each requiring individual certificate collection and validation. Certificates arrived in multiple languages, formats, and standards. Keeping track of what had been received, what was missing, what had expired, and what had been correctly extracted was an exercise in constant manual vigilance.

The consequences of errors went beyond retailer compliance. Wrong claims cost brand credibility and consumer trust. Replacing manual process with a systematic, automated approach became the clear path to making confident claims at scale.

The company worked with TrusTrace to automate certificate management and bring systematic rigour to the product claims workflow.

The sustainability team no longer chases suppliers for documents. Certificate requests are scheduled to be sent to suppliers automatically, who upload their documents in bulk to the platform without any manual data entry. They no longer manually extract or translate certificate data. TrusTrace’s AI then extracts, translates, and validates all key data — across certificate types, languages, and formats — while linking the data with specific POs. The team no longer cross-checks compositions against POs line by line. Material compositions and volumes are automatically cross-checked against POs, with discrepancies flagged for manual review.

Once validated, TrusTrace platform compiles the data into structured, submission-ready reports aligned to retailers’ specific requirements. The team receives a clean, accurate report to review and submit — without touching the underlying data validation.

TrusTrace’s platform supports all major certification standards across 100+ languages and formats, ensuring consistent, reliable data regardless of where in the supplier base a certificate originates. Automated expiration alerts and renewal requests to suppliers keep the certificate library current, closing the gaps that manual tracking inevitably missed.

Today, the fashion group makes sustainability claims with confidence — backed by validated data, not manual effort. Every certificate is collected, extracted, and cross-checked against POs automatically, so every claim is traceable to its source.

The operational impact translates directly into business value:

• One full-time employee freed from manual certificate processing — the equivalent of €50–60K in annual labor cost now redirected to strategic sustainability work.
• Thousands of certificate requests managed through TrusTrace, covering both product certificates and transaction certificates.
• Hundreds of POs validated every month across multiple seasonal cycles annually.
• Brand integrity protected by systematic AI validation. Every data point submitted to retailers is cross-checked against source certificates, eliminating the human error risk that came with manual compilation at scale.

This experience reflects a challenge common to fashion leaders globally: high-volume, high-stakes certificate management is still handled manually, with the brand integrity risks that come with it. The transition from spreadsheets and emails to an automated, AI-powered workflow demonstrates what becomes possible when that burden is removed — confident claims, protected reputation, and a sustainability team free to focus on what matters.