5 Things You Need to Know: Datacolor’s New Assessment Program

Datacolor Certify is a color assessment and lab audit program that helps brands and their suppliers dramatically reduce the time and cost of product development by ensuring that the suppliers are qualified and capable of meeting brand color quality expectations.

To help our customers and potential partners better understand our assessment program, we sat down with Head of Assessments Basto Wong to talk about Datacolor’s supplier assessment services:

Q: What is the Benefit of Datacolor Certify?

A: Benefit for Brands: Datacolor Certify provides transparency into your supply chain, reduces the time from design to consumer, ensures quality expectations are met, and gives qualified suppliers the ability to self-approve.

Benefit for Suppliers and Mills: Datacolor Certify delivers increased production efficiency, the ability to reach more brands by showcasing their capabilities, opportunities to optimize the color development process, and significant cost and resource savings.

Q: Looking at Where the Textile Industry Stands Today, Why is a Program like Datacolor Certify so Important?

A: The idea of an accreditation program isn’t new to the market, but our approach of a universal, yet economical program is. We took our team’s collective experience in the textile industry to build a program that utilized our regional resources, focused heavily on communication between mills and brands, and ultimately maximized the outcomes. This presents a first-of-its-kind opportunity for brands and mills to build and share knowledge and streamline their color management process—all of which will benefit the textile industry as a whole.

 

Q: What Can Mills Expect from the Assessment Process?

A: There are two ways mills can join the program:

1. Being nominated by a brand
2. Choosing to participate in the program on their own

In both cases, the process starts with the mill registering its site, equipment and operator information. After that, operators will participate in an online learning course to refresh their training. When the mill is ready, a Datacolor accreditor will go onsite and conduct the accreditation. Once the mill is qualified based on program requirements, they will be awarded a certificate. Throughout this process, mills will receive support from Datacolor’s local team.

Q: What Can Brands Expect?

A: To join the program, a brand must specify Datacolor as their accreditation service provider. After that, the brand can nominate a mill to get certified by Datacolor. If the mill is already certified, the brand can choose to recognize that mill’s certificate.

Brands committed to the program will have access to Datacolor’s certified mill database as well as regular communication with the assessment services team.

Q: Why Should Brands and Mills Participate?

A: This is a universal program, so a mill only needs to get certified once per year. After that, the certificate will be recognized by all the brands in the program. For mills accustomed to multiple certifications this can dramatically cut costs and save time. Once certified, mills can also use their certification to promote themselves to brands.

Traditionally, many brands run their certification program by sending quality team members oversees to certify mills. With this approach, the time, administrative and travel costs quickly add up. Brands participating in the Datacolor Certify program no longer need to do this, saving several months and a significant amount of money in the accreditation process.

Dive Deeper Into Datacolor Certify!