Standards Body Centralizes Supply Chain Data to Enable Sustainability

Textile Exchange supports the global textile supply chain by helping brands and supply system stakeholders to understand and improve the sustainability of their products. However, it encountered significant challenges in enabling the industry to track their materials at scale without imposing additional burden on stakeholders, due to the diverse and decentralized nature of the textile supply systems. 

To help address this, Textile Exchange partnered with Wavicle to develop a product roadmap and design the architecture for a multiparty application. The application aims to seamlessly integrate data from a variety of track-and-trace systems, provide central access to supply system stakeholders, and give brands the transparency needed to make informed, sustainable decisions about material purchasing.  

Challenges in ensuring integrity across multiparty applications 

Textile Exchange aims to provide the industry with the ability to easily and accurately track certified materials, attributes, impact and volumes across the supply chain. The organization intends to achieve this through a traceability framework that interoperates its own traceability system with various digital track-and-trace systems currently used in the industry. While Textile Exchange does not directly manage these digital track-and-trace systems, it saw this collaboration as an opportunity to leverage existing technologies for greater supply chain transparency.   

Over the past few years, Textile Exchange has made significant strides in consolidating data from its 30+ certifier systems to track certified materials. However, as the organization aims to scale, it is timely to begin to integrate with online track-and-trace systems for enhanced efficiency.  

Textile Exchange engaged Wavicle to help design a plugin that consolidates data across systems to provide a comprehensive view of raw material flow across the supply chains. By integrating Textile Exchange’s current system with existing track-and-trace systems used by the industry, the plugin will enable Textile Exchange to manage the traceability of their certified materials on multiple systems. Additionally, it will give brands visibility into materials that fall outside of Textile Exchange’s standards, supporting them in making informed decisions about their supply system and improving the overall sustainability of their products. 

Product roadmap and technical architecture 

Wavicle collaborated closely with Textile Exchange to translate its strategic goals into a product roadmap for a technically sound and scalable solution. The team distilled the core use cases, mapped out technical requirements, and designed the architecture to support the multiparty system. Wavicle designed an interoperable plugin using Microsoft Azure, ensuring seamless integration between Textile Exchange’s existing traceability system and various track-and-trace systems.   

The overarching vision for this solution is to credibly and efficiently connect the flow of certified raw material across the fashion, apparel, and textile supply chains. The platform is designed to ease the burden on suppliers through a single interface, leverage existing industry track-and-trace technologies, and maintain the integrity and credibility of Textile Exchange’s standards system using a material ledger as it adapts to the evolving legislative environment.   

“A transparent supply chain is essential for advancing sustainability in the fashion, apparel, and textile industry,” says Evonne Tan, Senior Director of Data and Technology at Textile Exchange. “Traceability ensures that every step of the journey is accountable. This project with Wavicle provides Textile Exchange with a blueprint to scale our traceability efforts. By establishing a credible and interoperable framework that integrates seamlessly with existing track-and-trace systems, we can collectively enhance supply chain transparency and consolidate insights across diverse and decentralized networks, empowering the industry to make informed sustainability decisions.”