As sourcing strategies evolve amid the various challenges supply chains are facing, the only way for businesses to gain a competitive edge is to double-down on their quality standards. Consistently-poor quality leads to exponential costs for a business, both internally and externally, and hampers brand image, market share, and long-term growth if not properly addressed. In 2020, consumers returned an estimated $428 billion worth of merchandise in the U.S. alone. To succeed, brands and retailers in consumer goods are willing to invest in digital solutions which can standardize processes and enable proactive, rather than reactive decision-making.

QIMA: Digital from day one

We at QIMA help thousands of brands, retailers, and manufacturers improve their product and supplier quality, so they can see upcoming challenges and seize opportunities to stay one step ahead of the shifting conditions.

“Enhancing the collaboration in these supply networks is important because many businesses haven’t mapped out their suppliers that well. In Q2-2021, we ran a survey that revealed that 77% of the businesses had blind spots in their supply chains. QIMAone helps bring all the players on the supply chain together, to shine a light on these previously obscured areas,” says Damien Tampé, Chief Technology Officer, QIMA.

Since our customers and partners actively expressed their growing need for visibility, we turned to Google Cloud to work on an innovative platform called QIMAone. QIMAone is an open, collaborative platform that provides unified quality and compliance data. By connecting brands and suppliers into a single source of truth, they can minimize major defects, increase visibility, and drive continuous improvement collaboratively and efficiently.

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Google Cloud: The technological foundation

Our key priorities in developing QIMAone were global accessibility, privacy, and security, which ultimately led us to decide Google Cloud was the best partner. “We researched the cloud computing market extensively, and Google Cloud was clearly the best fit for QIMAone,” says Tampé. “That decision was based on a variety of factors, but as an agile, digital-native project, the flexibility Google Cloud offered was paramount.”

The challenge was to imbed more than 15 years of experience in rolling out quality and compliance management programs in a comprehensive digital platform for global brands, retailers, and manufacturers. As supply chains are getting more complex and global, the platform needed to work perfectly in any region including China. The QIMAone developers ran multiple regional with the Kubernetes Engine for efficient delivery of its services. The flexibility and scalability of Google Cloud Engine allowed the team to achieve the highest level of accessibility for all QIMAone users across the globe.

Tampé says, “With running our development and staging environment in Google Kubernetes Engine as preemptable hardware, we’re able to scale our infrastructure up or down to match the activities of each of our development teams and keep down costs when it’s no longer needed.” That kind of back-end flexibility benefits both clients and developers as it lets both groups put their efforts where they matter the most.

Priority on security and privacy

The QIMAone development team understood that performance and security are vital when it comes to data. The main QIMAone databases are run using Cloud SQL with database files stored in Cloud Storage. Cloud Functions is used to offload event-based processes that don’t require intensive resources, such as the generation of PDFs for data reports.

QIMAone’s cloud infrastructure powered by Google is certified with the highest level of security, SOC 1/2/3 and ISO 27XXX. Access to data is strictly regulated, ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations and best practices. “We are able to use the Security Command Center to keep an eye on things,” Tampé says. “We also enjoy the simplicity of the tools Google Cloud provides to protect our data, particularly for automatic backup and point-in-time recovery in Cloud SQL.”

A long-term partnership

As QIMAone continues to get adopted by businesses from around the globe, the partnership between QIMA and Google Cloud will continue to strengthen. “We’re always looking for ways to improve our productivity and efficiency, as well as connecting to other platforms while guaranteeing a very high level of reliability and security,” says Tampé.

People can learn more about QIMAone, and schedule a demonstration, by visiting https://www.qimaone.com/ .