California Apparel News

Technology providers offer advice for companies looking to add product lifecycle management systems.

Large apparel manufacturers and retailers producing around the world have learned that product lifecycle management software keeps all divisions on track to bring in production efficiently and on time.

The challenge is to know when to add PLM. California Apparel NewsManufacturing and Technology Editor Sarah Wolfson recently caught up with several apparel technology executives to find out what signs apparel makers should look for when deciding whether to add—or upgrade—their PLM systems.

Mark Burstein
President of Sales, Marketing and R&D
NGC

If fashion companies are running their businesses by spreadsheets, emails or outdated legacy systems, they’re on a collision course with potential disaster. Without the visibility of PLM systems, they run the risk of missing deadlines, over- or under developing product lines, missing their margins, and experiencing mistakes in quality. The list goes on and on, and these are all symptoms that a company is ready for PLM.

Speed-to-market is one of the key reasons that companies adopt PLM systems. The most successful fashion companies are designing closer to season than ever before in order to be on-trend and more responsive to consumers. As a result, companies must compress their lead times and produce products as close as possible to the retail-floor set date. This helps maximize fullprice sales and reduce markdowns, which increases sell-though and profitability.

SKU proliferation is another big driver in fashion PLM adoption. Managing the increasing amount of styles, colors and sizes that fashion companies are developing today is extremely difficult without a PLM system.

PLM isn’t a luxury anymore. Fashion companies must become more efficient and productive. PLM can be the key to helping them compete.

Stacey Charbin
Fashion Marketing Director
Lectra

Fashion is a business of change. And it comes as a surprise that, sometimes, fashion companies are hesitant to change. Sometimes because the business is so fast paced that you don’t have time to breathe and sometimes because you aren’t sure how to go about making the changes that you think you need.

This is where PLM enters the picture. A PLM solution shakes up a traditional way of working with collaborative technology.

PLM channels expertise where it matters most—vision, creativity, quality and fit—while providing traceability and visibility. PLM is a big change. And if top management isn’t fully behind the idea of such a solution, a company simply isn’t ready for it.

By working with top fashion brands around the world, we’ve seen several other signs of readiness. Previous experience with enterprise software projects— ERP, in particular—is a good sign that a company can implement PLM effectively. This implies a strong IT team and support, which will be needed for a PLM project. There should also be initiatives already underway to standardize and formalize collection development. A company should have a firm understanding of change management and be serious about critical path management. Clear roles and responsibilities as well as organizational buy-in will help ensure successful implementation and sustainability of a PLM solution.

James Horne
Vice President of Marketing
Centric Software

Today, omni-channel retailing practices are pressuring apparel makers to produce more SKUs than ever before. This demand puts enormous pressure on product teams. If existing systems—like PDM [product data management] or spreadsheets—hamper rather than help the efforts of product teams to keep up, this is definitely a sign that it’s time for PLM. PLM systems—especially those with apparel-industry business practices built in and that implement quickly right out of the box—allow apparel companies to ramp up product development—and SKUs—quickly.

For example, one North American apparel company found it could manage 22 percent more SKUs year over year—without increasing headcount—once it implemented a PLM system designed for the apparel industry.

Many apparel companies are so strangled by their current work environments and systems that they can’t pursue a new market when they identify one. An effective PLM system provides a way to track, document and manage rapid product development with good cost control.

Whether a company conducts its own [regulatory] audits or outsources them, the challenges are the same. Maintaining visibility, documenting results quickly and accurately, and the ability to produce well-organized, clear, succinct documentation upon request (such as for inspectors) are all essential. A good PLM system delivers all of this in the same system where all other product information is stored. This “single source of truth” approach results in better compliance management, visibility and risk mitigation, as well as better and safer products.

Fast fashion used to be a differentiator for a few companies but is now being adopted across the industry. Fast fashion’s previously unheard-of development cycles require much more efficient product-development efforts and a way to integrate everyone from designers to line planners and from merchandisers to factories and retailers. Everyone in the supply chainmust be on the same page, working from the same information—at all times—in all time zones. A PLM system that delivers robust functionality and implements quickly allows more product cycles in shorter periods of time.

Many apparel companies view their creative staff as a differentiator. Yet designers can become uninspired by the atmosphere in which they work. The last thing someone from a top design school wants to do is spend a lots of time tracking information through a myriad of spreadsheets. A PLM system designed for the apparel industry removes administrative headaches and allows creative teams to be creative. As a bonus, this environment can even help in the recruitment and hiring process.

[A PLM system can help] when the supply chain is performing well, but the company still needs to improve margins. This usually happens when companies put all their cost-saving efforts into ERP. The problem with this approach is that ERP only affects costs that occur after the product is in the marketplace. The greatest impact on product costs are locked in during design and development, long before the sale. With PLM, a company has much better control of costs and can do more what-if scenario planning before locking in costs during development.

Bill Brewster
Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing for Gerber Technology's Yunique Solutions business

Gerber Technology

We find that companies turn to PLM when their process becomes too difficult to manage in the traditional way. Without a PLM system, organizations have data dispersed in all sorts of places—in emails and spreadsheets— and, because product details change so quickly, the data is never current. A PLM system serves as a dynamic repository of all of the details associated with planning, designing, developing, sourcing, tracking and reporting on a product line. With PLM, everyone in the process pulls data from a single source that tracks history, workflows and individual responsibilities to help companies go from concept to finished product in a fraction of the time.

PLM systems make it possible to connect your creative process with your supply chain and truly collaborate dynamically with vendors around the world in real time. This means vendors are elevated to true partners because they can actively participate in the product-development process. The best systems are able to translate information into multiple languages to ensure details aren’t lost in translation. PLM systems also enable companies to easily track the performance of their vendors to determine who their highperforming partners are at any point in time.

High-performing organizations want visibility into their entire process, from planning to purchase, and need to be able to estimate costs quickly and easily. A comprehensive and user-friendly PLM system will enable everyone involved in the process, including executives, to track progress and ensure that commitments are met and quality is upheld.

Robust PLM systems can also be integrated with a company’s enterprise systems like, for example, ERP. This gives managers all the information they need to make informed decisions going forward. Which lines are the most profitable? Which vendors consistently hit their deadlines? They present the information graphically and enable managers to easily drill down to the details. This means you not only reduce time spent in meetings scrutinizing spreadsheets that may or may not be providing the most current, comprehensive view of your business, but you also increase profits by getting the right products to market on time at the right cost.

Ben Silver
Senior Director, Business Development
Simparel Solutions

Growth in smaller companies is the main reason they need to move to a PLM system to enable them to track and cost their preproduction products more efficiently. Doing things in Excel and on spreadsheets just doesn’t cut it when companies see growth in the 30 percent to 40 percent range. Their staff can’t keep up with all the activities, so they either add staff—which can get expensive and time consuming—or add a system to enable their process to be tracked automatically, and there is only one version of the truth throughout the company.

Larger companies look to add or replace PLM systems based on how their business models have changed. In some cases, bringing production back to this hemisphere has created a need for more design and development than they were getting overseas from their vendors. In that case, a new system is needed to help develop product quickly and efficiently to meet the new business model of manufacturing, where speed to market is needed—as well as replace what was being done overseas for them. What we are also seeing is that the unified approach—where everything is in one system—works best, so interfaces, manual inputs and APIs are not having to be created. [An API, or application protocol interface, allows different software systems to communicate with each other.] Gartner [the technology research firm] did a study in 2011 in which they said, “Modern apparel companies must adopt an end-to-end model of operations in order to succeed.”