plm | product lifecycle management | centric …...plm combats the challenges of factories head on...

©2018 Centric Software Inc. All rights reserved.

FROM FASHION HOUSE TO FACTORY FLOOR: HOW PLM HAS BECOME THE BACKBONE

TECHNOLOGY FOR MODERN MANUFACTURERS

©2018 Centric Software Inc. All rights reserved. 2

Every day, apparel manufacturers handle an avalanche of communication from their customers – brands and retailers – dealing with samples, revisions and shipments. Deadlines get shorter. Compliance requirements change and vary from country to country in the global marketplace.

In this environment, information management is crucial. Tracking every piece of documentation and communication related to each product is a major challenge for manufacturers. In a world of shrinking calendar timelines, there’s no room for critical path mistakes.

How do you maintain up-to-date product data for multiple customers, effectively handle version control and capture communication with clients, your internal teams, suppliers and other partners in a format that’s easy to access and search?

For manufacturers fighting to survive in a global marketplace of shifting consumer (and customer) expectations, retail digital transformation, more SKUs, shorter runs, faster sample turnarounds and looming mass market made-to-measure, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is now a must-have.

MANUFACTURERS, MEET PLM

PLM solutions provide a central repository for all product-related data and communications, updated in real time. No more searching for the latest revision requests in scattered emails, PDFs and spreadsheets – everything lives in a user-friendly ‘single source of the truth’ system.

Modern manufacturers use PLM to meet challenges such as calculating accurate quotes and getting them to clients fast, giving more design & production options, managing more SKUs with smaller order quantities and turning samples around very quickly - in a couple of weeks, or even days, adding in ODM/design proposal capabilities and reducing high cost of sampling. With PLM, manufacturers can accurately account for the lead times of globally sourced materials, enabling more effective planning to meet tight delivery timelines and avoid late penalties. They can also more accurately track costs to protect product margins and avoid bad surprises.

PLM combats the challenges of factories head on with the ability to manage communications and supply chains from concept to delivery in one platform. It has become an essential tool to enable visibility into internal product development and to manage critical delivery timelines across customers and product types.

Traditionally, brands and retailers have been the largest adopters of PLM systems. Whether manufacturers are working for brands or retailers, or designing their own lines, they manage much of the same product information, plus a whole lot more technical data. There are differences in the specific data they handle, but their goal is the same: to get the right product delivered on time, for the right price and at the right quality.

Has PLM become a necessity for manufacturers? How exactly does PLM propel manufacturers to the top of their game? Read on to find out how PLM is empowering manufacturers with four key benefits: communication, transparency, productivity & efficiency and agility.


OEM PROCESS

DESIGN CONCEPT

PRODUCTION PROCUREMENT FINANCE

BUSINESS PLANNING

PRODUCTION PLANNING TRACKINGENGINEERING COSTING

LIBRARY

QUICK COSTING

MATERIALCUT

MAKE PATTERN

CAPACITY PLANNING

TECHPACK SAMPLING ORDER SHIP

NEGOTIATION

TECH PACK PROTO COLOR

FITPRE.

PROD.

SAMPLE ORDER

INTERNAL COSTING


COMMUNICATION

PLM is the backbone of communication. Powerful overarching workflows and calendars, specific to your team and process, route tasks to team members and partners responsible for their completion. One of the major challenges for manufacturers and brands alike, is managing the critical path – all the steps needed to take a product from concept to delivery – at lightning speed. In PLM, friendly task reminders notify users that due dates are coming up and virtual ‘wrist slaps’ are sent if tasks get behind schedule.

Good communication is all about satisfying customers by setting expectations and following through on them. This doesn’t happen by magic. The right tools can ensure you stay two steps ahead via a bigger picture view so you can proactively manage development, samples and production and offer alternative options needed. No more being blindsided when a supplier runs out of a certain fabric, not knowing what trims go with which garment or worse, using the wrong grade rules, thus throwing off your delivery timeline for your customer or delivering defective goods.

PLM workflows make communication, managing work in process and sticking to planned timelines easier for everyone involved. Let’s say Brand A needs shirt samples in one week, but Brand B needs final delivery of a shirt style in four weeks, including sampling. Your PLM workflow can either calculate forward to the one-week sample deadline or calculate backwards to show you what needs to happen to hit the four-week drop dead date.

“AS ONE OF THE LARGEST APPAREL EXPORTERS IN SRI

LANKA, WE SOUGHT A PLM SOLUTION TO HELP MANAGE DATA FLOWS

AND COMMUNICATION.”

SURENDRA KARUNAKARAN, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER

AT BRANDIX


If your client needs samples in one week, then that due date can be applied to a sample making workflow and the team will know, for example, whether they’ll have time to order new sample fabric or whether they’ll have to use a similar fabric to get that sample delivered on time. PLM can also show them if the fabric and trim they need for the sample is in inventory, or if it will need to be ordered, and critically, what the lead times are.

Better communication leads to more effective execution, leading in turn to greater customer satisfaction, which leads to even more business, and more things to manage...which isn’t a problem with PLM in place!

Knowledge is power, and PLM data can be used to plan and communicate information to everyone who needs to be involved. For example, when a tech pack is submitted, the workflow will show if the customer received the sample in the time expected, and whether they returned comments in a timely manner. If you haven’t heard from them, you can link to the shipment tracking to see when it was delivered and follow up.

Once samples are approved, mini-workflows connected to sub-processes such as lab dip approval, material testing and quality control activate to manage production timing. Test labs can upload material or garment test results. Customers are kept in the loop about what stage their products have reached in development and production. Suppliers can see when they need to deliver materials to you and work that into their own timelines. The days of sending eight million emails to coordinate planning and tracking are no more!


TRANSPARENCY

Finding it impossible to see through a murky soup of irrelevant information, outdated document versions and emails that don’t answer the right questions? PLM brings transparency – the secret ingredient in the successful management of time and resources.

The management of materials and their sources, costs and availability can be very opaque. Factory teams often have their own ‘library’ of materials hanging in a closet or stuffed in filing drawers, which makes it hard to find what they need, when they need it. This can be a costly headache for manufacturers.

PLM material libraries keep essential material information such as costs, test results, technical properties and information needed for labelling in a visible and readily accessible place. This data and related images are stored in one virtual location, where everyone who has access to the library can see them. Having material information in one place eliminates redundant entries and aids in planning by showing important information such as lead times and cuttable fabric widths.

PLM solutions with robust and flexible search capabilities make it easy to find all product information and slice and dice it into useful reports. Everyone needs to run reports, but day-to-day, some information is more critical during certain seasons. Users of PLM can continually customize what they see on their personal dashboards, whether it’s product status, alerts to late tasks or their personalized configured reports. Really important information is literally in their face-as long as they are ok with that!

“THE TOOLS WE HAD BEEN USING FOR MANY YEARS WERE NO LONGER UP

TO DATE AND WERE NOT SOPHISTICATED ENOUGH

FOR OUR BUSINESS PROCESSES. WE HAD

DIFFERENT SYSTEMS ALL CONTAINING VARIOUS PRODUCT DATA WHICH MADE IT DIFFICULT FOR

USERS TO KEEP UP. IN SOME CASES, THE SAME DATA WAS BEING ENTERED TWICE IN DIFFERENT SYSTEMS AND

OCCASIONALLY DATA WOULD BE NOT BE ACCESSIBLE

TO SOME USERS BECAUSE IT WAS ASSOCIATED WITH

PERSONAL DATABASES OR ACCOUNTS.”

GIOVANNI BISOTTI, IT MANAGER AT IMAX SRL


PRODUCTIVITY & EFFICIENCY

PLM improves productivity and efficiency through easy access to data. Once the development clock starts ticking, PLM users quickly see the impact of new design or production details on the materials procurement or production costs and also sewing ‘make’ time and costs by referencing construction details linked to operations costing.

Are your clients repeating a product from last season or bringing back a style that was popular a couple of years ago? You’ve already been there and done that. Simply copy over information from the previous style, allowing you to cut time, not corners.

No matter what the design details are, international standard time data such as GSD, can be connected to give greater accuracy when benchmarking labor costs. Patterns and markers are added to products. This gives your team the visibility to determine, for example, that a long bias-cut skirt will NOT fit into the cuttable width of the fabric desired by the design team. Once you find that out, the faster you can all move onto a different solution – and still keep to your original calendar.

Rekeying of data and hunting through emails for essential information is a huge and unnecessary time waster. Unfortunately, many manufacturers are spending a large amount of time doing this – before they implement PLM, that is. Once they grasp the productivity potential of PLM, a favorite PLM feature they look for is the ability to import client tech packs directly into their PLM system. The original tech pack files can also be easily attached to products for reference, as can files for patterns and markers. Nothing gets completely lost in data translation.

As manufacturers start to explore made-to-measure (MTM) they are turning to PLM to manage that too and linking online ordering with their systems to automatically create tech packs for custom products that are then sent straight to the factory floor. Users can configure reports, to see, for example, where material items are used on other products and if they are in stock. Materials can then be ordered to optimize order quantities.

The industry is seeing big shifts in customer expectations, which makes it even more valuable and critical to use time spent on development and delivery efficiently. PLM propels you to the top of the mountain of work manufacturers face each day.

“THE COMPANY IS DEVELOPING VERY

FAST AND AS WE MOVE FROM WHOLESALER TO RETAILER, RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IS

BECOMING MORE COMPLEX TO MANAGE. WE HAVE A LOT OF SUPPLIERS AND ARE CHANGING FROM

TRADITIONAL SUPPLY CHAIN METHODS TO A MODEL

THAT WILL ALLOW US TO MOVE MORE QUICKLY. FOR EXAMPLE, IF WE GET ALL OUR SUPPLIERS TO USE A COMMON PLATFORM, WE

CAN GET REAL TIME QUOTES, AVAILABILITY AND SO FORTH. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IS ALSO AN AREA OF FOCUS – WE NEED TO MAKE SURE THAT OLD DESIGNS ARE

RETAINED SO THAT THEY CAN BE RE-USED AND NOT LOST.”

CHEN JIANCI, VP OF IT & SUPPLY CHAIN AT 361°


AGILITY

New challenges are an opportunity to implement best practices. However, the best practices of yesterday don’t always apply today. The industry continually shifts because of geo-political events, customer requirements and market forces – and everyone must fluidly adjust in order to stay competitive.

A robust searchable material library and the capability to reference similar products that you’ve developed makes doing quick product quotes faster and more accurate. A more detailed bill of materials makes it more likely that the first quote you give to the customer will actually align with your margins as you work with them to refine the elements of their products and negotiate costs. Information can be shared across geographic locations to your factories and mills or customer and logistics team members, so that flags can be raised ASAP if anyone sees a potential roadblock.

Along with configurable dashboards, being easily able to create new product templates for new product types and make sure information required by customers is captured in the system enables agility. Doing this in PLM is straightforward. Although it is restricted by permissions to maintain control, in configurable PLM systems it doesn’t require programming or a consultant to do it.

Workflows are also flexible, and if a client’s processes change or you start working with new ones they can be adjusted in-house and don’t require outside expertise. This allows you to take on more customers without bringing on a whole new team to manage their product delivery schedules. You can say “yes” to more customer requests.

Manufacturers have a dizzying amount of moving parts to manage, PLM gives them the superpower to remain agile by having a strong, and complete, foundation in place. The day to day stays under control giving you the freedom and flexibility to try new business initiatives and react quickly while minimizing risk.

“OUR GOAL IS TO HARNESS DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

THROUGHOUT THE VALUE CHAIN, BUILDING CROSS-

SILO AND CROSS-CHANNEL CAPABILITIES CONNECTING IT, MACHINES AND PEOPLE IN REAL-TIME IN ORDER TO MANUFACTURE PRODUCTS

BETTER AND FASTER, LEVERAGING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE FOR THE

DEMANDS OF OMNICHANNEL RETAILING, OUR WORKFORCE

AND THE FUTURE OF MANUFACTURING. CENTRIC’S CONFIGURABLE SOLUTION ALLOWS US TO SHORTEN CYCLE TIMES, ENHANCE

DELIVERY, BRING VISIBILITY AND TRANSPARENCY INTO THE SUPPLY CHAIN, AND ULTIMATELY EXPAND THE

VALUE WE DELIVER TO OUR CUSTOMERS.”

MANFRED PAEPER, BUSINESS PROCESS AND IT MANAGER AT NINIAN & LESTER


CONCLUSION

PLM is no longer just for brands or retailers but also offers great benefits for OEM/ODM manufacturers. PLM provides unprecedented visibility into work and progress and completed items; saves time and effort by tracking, reporting and capturing information across suppliers, partners and customers in one place; and gives manufacturers the agility to adapt to changes quickly.

It’s important to recognize that manufacturers have different requirements and priorities to brands and retailers, even though they might handle a lot of the same types of product data and communication. Centric Software, the PLM market leader, listens to clients and their needs. Centric creates valued working partnerships to connect clients to best practices, deliver real value and drive results.

One recent addition to Centric PLM is the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make better design and development decisions using Centric’s AI Image Search. This Centric PLM feature uses machine learning to search and match fabric or trim samples to find the closest match saved in material libraries. AI Image search saves hours of time searching through physical and digital samples and the cost of giving up the search and re-ordering a fabric that may already be on-hand.

Centric PLM also has 15 industry first mobile apps for PLM connecting designers, merchandisers and manufactures directly to PLM anytime and from anywhere they work in the world.

One of these mobile apps for Centric PLM is Sample Review which is perfect for manufacturers who do fit approval for their clients-especially for technical developers and pattern makers. This app cuts out paper changes to tech packs recorded during fit meetings and eliminates the need for information to be rekeyed when teams return to their desks. With this app, they can create style reviews, record notes, capture photos and add annotations during the reviews. All the data is published to the PLM system in the background and is available when they get back to their desk.

Another powerful feature of Centric PLM is Slicer which can easily analyze seasons’ or years’ worth of information to answer questions about financial and supplier performance, costs or other complex queries requiring significant “what-iffing” and number crunching. Decision-makers are enriched with analytics for powerful roll-ups, drill-downs and split hierarchies to vastly augment the kinds of financial analyses that can be performed. The Slicer feature takes the guesswork out of estimating the impact of material costs to protect profit margins.

Centric PLM users harness workflows to account for the lead times of globally sourced materials to meet tight delivery timelines, track work in progress in real time and realize the wide range of benefits and real ROI that PLM brings to their businesses. Whether manufacturers are supporting customers’ design departments, designing their own product lines for private label or delivering custom made-to-measure garments, modern manufacturing is enabled by the power of PLM.

“WE HOPE TO OPTIMIZE OUR MANAGEMENT WITH

PLM AND THEREFORE BE MORE COMPETITIVE IN THE MARKET. OUR

MAJOR CONCERNS WERE ABOUT THE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT PROCESS; PRODUCT PLANNING, CREATIVE

DESIGN, PRODUCT R&D AND MATERIALS AND

FABRICS DEVELOPMENT. THE CENTRIC TEAM

FULLY UNDERSTANDS OUR BUSINESS AND WAS

ABLE TO TAILOR THE SOLUTION TO OUR NEEDS. CENTRIC HAS DELIVERED A FIRST-CLASS PRODUCT

MANAGEMENT SOLUTION TO US.”

YE LIN, EIN CLOTHING


“THE CENTRIC TEAM REALLY UNDERSTANDS OEM BUSINESS AND WAS ABLE TO TAILOR THE SOLUTION

TO OUR NEEDS.”

VT GARMENT



“WE HAVE NEVER WORKED WITH SUCH A GREAT

TEAM OF PEOPLE BEFORE, INCLUDING THE PRE-

SALES TEAM.”

RUWANTHA BANDARA, BRANDIX PROJECT MANAGER OF CENTRIC

SOFTWARE PROJECT


For Centric Software’s manufacturing partners, Centric’s configurable, single source of the truth PLM is an essential piece of their business. Centric PLM allows for manufacturers to connect directly to their customers’ PLM through the Centric’s Connector Hub for instant importing of customer data. It’s the go-to hub that manages communication, enhances transparency, increases productivity and facilitates agility.

What does that really mean? PLM gives your business the power to take on more work from more clients, cut the time it takes to develop and deliver products, be more efficient with the same number of staff and do the most important thing of all – keep your customers satisfied.

To find out more about Centric PLM for manufacturers and to book your personalized demo today visit: www.centricsoftware.com/manufacturing

www.centricsoftware.com

©2018 Centric Software Inc. All rights reserved. Centric is a registered trademark of Centric Software. All other brands and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

ABOUT CENTRIC SOFTWARE

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley and offices in trend capitals around the world, Centric Software provides a Digital Transformation Platform for the most prestigious names in fashion, retail, footwear, luxury, outdoor and consumer goods. Centric Visual Innovation Platform (VIP) is a visual, fully digital collection of boards for touch-based devices like iPad, iPhone and large-scale, touch-screen televisions. Centric VIP transforms decision making and automates execution to truly collapse time to market and distance to trend. Centric’s flagship product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, Centric 8, delivers enterprise-class merchandise planning, product development, sourcing, business planning, quality, and collection management functionality tailored for fast-moving consumer industries. Centric SMB packages extended PLM including innovative technology and key industry learnings tailored for small businesses.

Centric Software has received multiple industry awards, including the Frost & Sullivan Global Product Differentiation Excellence Award in Retail, Fashion, and Apparel PLM in 2016 and Frost & Sullivan’s Global Retail, Fashion, and Apparel PLM Product Differentiation Excellence Award in 2012. Red Herring named Centric to its Top 100 Global list in 2013, 2015, and 2016.

plm | product lifecycle management | centric …...plm combats the challenges of factories head on...

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