The fashion industry has been undergoing tremendous change in recent times. Moreover, customers in today’s retail environment are becoming increasingly demanding, and expect to be offered innovative styles and good quality at attractive prices, on an ever more frequent basis.
Fashion brands, retailers & manufacturers are forced to look at innovative avenues for profit improvement and drive efficiencies across all the functions. Getting product to market faster, increasing collaboration across the extended ecosystem, investing in a single product driven and process oriented knowledge-base across the extended enterprise, encouraging increased standardization and re-usability across the key processes, enabling dashboards to track and review process flow issues are some of the options that many best-in-class companies are exploring. Companies are increasingly investing in PLM to manage these tasks with higher efficiency.
PLM is, therefore, a long-term strategy for getting products to market faster with reduced cost and higher quality. This is achieved by enabling the organization to manage all information about its product, from initial concept through commercialization, by integrating all areas of the company including the extended supply chain in a collaborative forum.
PLM for the fashion industry can be defined as including the following major constituents:
- Collaborative product design
- Development process management
- Product Data Management (PDM) and Specification Management
Workflow, calendar and event management
- Trading partner collaboration
The implementation of a fashion PLM solution will become a necessary investment in overcoming new market challenges, but there are many apprehensions related to PLM adoption as well as several pitfalls that one should avoid. Some of them being:
-How do you start & how can you prioritize initiatives?
-How does one identify the right PLM product platform?
-How does one ensure that the knowledge residing in existing systems/processes is leveraged in the new system?
-How do you ensure a phased, yet accelerated implementation, realizing early benefits, while minimizing business risk?
-It is important to clearly document existing and future processes before implementing any PLM platform
-Before proceeding with any customizations to the PLM platform, it is important to understand Out of the box (OOTB) functionality
-Take users into confidence in an iterative process ensuring system acceptance and rollout
Geometric has developed its unique D.R.A.P.E.D.TM methodology to address some of these unique challenges. D.R.A.P.E.D. is a graded six stage process, with each stage having a clearly defined entry, task, validation and exit criteria. Each phase deliverable is marked by customer interactions and discussions. D.R.A.P.E.D. uses a combination of templates, processes, and productivity tools. It’s PLM Adoption Maturity Level (AML) framework, facilitates an assessment of the customers’ current maturity, based on which, strategies and a detailed improvement roadmap is charted out for a phased, yet accelerated implementation. Geometric has successfully accelerated PLM adoption by 20-25% across various implementations, thus demonstrating value delivered by this methodology.
By viewing PLM as a system that
- Includes collaborative & controlled product development across the extended ecosystem
- Leverages a re-usable and centralized knowledge base
- Enables efficient resource management (both internal as well as external)
- Automates workflows and enables enterprise visibility
Fashion brands, retailers & manufacturers are able to quickly react to emerging trends, draw on the experience of industry best practices and keep financial objectives on target.
With significant experience in implementing PLM solutions for several end-customers, Geometric has been delivering significant value to fashion brands, retailers and manufacturers in making sure that they can achieve their business objectives with PLM.
For more information on Geometric’s offerings for the fashion domain click here
For further queries, kindly reach Atul at atul.dhakappa@geometricglobal.com |
