You've Invested. Now the Hard Part.
Arvela and Kestner made similar decisions in the same eighteen-month window. Both invested in supply chain data infrastructure — new platforms, supplier connectivity, updated product information management. Both were responding to the same regulatory horizon, committed comparable budgets, and went live within a few months of each other.
Two years on, they are not in the same place.
The first difference appeared before either system went live. Arvela spent three months before implementation doing something that looked, from the outside, like delay. They were establishing what the system needed to hold — not in a technical sense, but in an organisational one. Which function owned the authoritative source for material composition data. What happened when a supplier changed an input mid-season. Who had the mandate to resolve a conflict between two functions working from different figures. What data quality actually meant for their specific products and supply chain, and how they would know when they had it.
Kestner configured the system and went live on schedule. Those questions were on the list. They would be resolved in the next phase.
The next phase arrived. The questions were still there, now embedded in a live system built around assumptions that hadn't been tested. Resolving them required changes to workflows that teams had already adapted to. It took longer than it would have before go-live, involved more stakeholders than it should have, and produced a set of compromises that satisfied the governance requirement without quite closing the gap.
The second shift appeared in Arvela's sourcing conversations, without announcement. Procurement had been asked a new question — not as an additional compliance check, but as a dimension of the commercial evaluation. What would this supplier relationship produce in terms of data, and what would that be worth? Not every negotiation turned on it. But it was present. Over several seasons, Arvela's supplier base began to shift — not dramatically, but in the direction of relationships that produced better information as a natural byproduct of genuine partnership.
At Kestner, sourcing continued to be evaluated on the metrics it had always been evaluated on. Data quality landed downstream, as it always had — on the sustainability team, on the DPP implementation team, on whoever was assembling the next disclosure. The investment in infrastructure had not changed what procurement was asked to optimise for. The data the system received reflected that.
The third was in the brief. At Arvela, a question had been introduced into the product development process — not as a constraint from a compliance function, but as a dimension of the material conversation. What would be knowable about this product across its lifecycle? Which construction choices would allow for the kind of verified traceability the passport would require? The question didn't always change the outcome. But it was present early enough to change it when it mattered — before suppliers were confirmed, before commercial terms were set, before the decisions that determine what data will ever be collectible had already been made.
At Kestner, the data requirements arrived at the brief stage as an appended layer — a checklist of fields that needed to be populated, added after the creative and commercial decisions had been made. Some fields could be satisfied from existing information. Others required data that the product, as specified, would never produce. The team worked around the gaps as best it could.
None of those differences are dramatic in isolation. No single decision separates the two organisations. What separates them is the accumulation — the series of small choices Arvela made, alongside its technology investment, about accountability and measurement and what questions got asked in which rooms.
That new value is visible in the ordinary course of business.
When a major retail partner asks Arvela for verified product-level environmental indicators as a condition of a new range qualification, the answer exists. It takes hours to produce, not weeks. When a supplier changes a material input mid-season, Arvela's record updates — the passport reflects what the product actually contains, not what it contained at launch. When a green claims challenge arrives, the evidence is there. Not assembled under pressure from whatever can be found. Present, maintained, and defensible.
At Kestner, each of those moments is a project. The retailer qualification triggers a data-gathering exercise that pulls people from three functions for six weeks. The supplier input change goes undetected until a discrepancy surfaces in a disclosure review. The claims challenge produces a period of internal investigation that is resolved expensively, but not in a way that prevents the next one.
The operational difference is real. The strategic one runs deeper.
Arvela is building something durable. Each season the supplier relationships deepen, the data gets richer, and the decisions that depend on it get better. The sourcing team can see concentration risk before a disruption makes it visible. The design function can specify materials knowing what will be provable about them. The sustainability team governs a standard rather than assembles an argument. The data asset grows because the organisation decided to grow it — and because that decision was made early enough to shape how the technology was configured, how suppliers were engaged, and what questions entered rooms they had never previously entered.
Kestner is paying the same cost repeatedly. Each new regulatory requirement triggers a version of the same exercise — assembling information the organisation should already hold, in a form the organisation was never quite structured to maintain. The investment was real. The asset it was meant to build has not materialised, because the organisational decisions that would have made it grow were deferred in favour of going live on schedule.
When the first enforcement window opens, both organisations will have a system. One will have an organisation to match.
The technology was never the hard part. The hard part was always what came after — and it still is.
Michael Shea is a digital excellence advisor, non-executive director, and leadership coach working with organisations navigating the human and technical dimensions of digital transformation. He hosts The Aeolian Discourse and writes at The Aeolian.
Photo by Cody Moore on Unsplash