Interview with Mr Chris Groves

Centric provides product lifecycle management (PLM) and sourcing solutions to companies with hard lines, soft lines or both in the consumer goods and fashion industries.

Our comprehensive solution, Centric 8, provides functionality to address three critical areas needed for success:

• Product Development: Centric 8 manages all product information – design files, color charts, size charts – to become a ‘single record of truth’ about the product so that the entire design team, including designers, product managers, suppliers, regardless of their global location, can easily collaborate to reduce errors, and speed trend-right products to market. Robust Calendar Management assures visibility into tasks and deadlines, and allows managers to focus on critical tasks before they fall behind and become problems.

• Line Planning and Profitability Management: Centric 8 aligns corporate goals with design teams’ activities, assuring everyone is on the same page. With easy to use tools, teams can accurately capture and manage ALL cost information, and understand products’ margin contributions, down to the SKU and even sales channel level, before launching new lines or new products. This knowledge enables teams to make effective product go/no-go decisions during the development cycle – adding resources to profitable products if needed, or cutting losses on products that won’t achieve their margin goals.

• Sourcing: Centric 8 helps to manage suppliers, track and manage compliance, understand complete landed cost information, and consolidate orders for better pricing power. Powerful supplier scorecarding functionality is achieved through flexible, easy-to-use dashboarding and reporting capabilities.

The recent economic climate has customers focused on technology that will provide several specific benefits. Now more than ever, customers want to leverage costs where ever possible. They seek to cut costs or scale up without adding cost. They view outmoded product development processes – characterized by a proliferation of spreadsheets and manual processes, inefficiency and waste, and product delays – as highly leveragable and ripe for technology investment that would yield significant cost savings and bottom-line impact.

Customers are also extremely interested in rapid implementations so that they can begin to achieve return on investment very quickly. They therefore want a modular solution that can provide out-of-the-box functionality and solve problems rapidly.

And, customers are focused on usability. Their teams are spread across the globe, and intuitive, easy-to-use technology solutions that do not require extensive training are the only way to assure the wide-spread user adoption required so that a technology investment will achieve its goals.

No, I doubt this trend will ever reverse itself. The world has become “flat” and economies are specializing around their core competencies. Who’s to say but that in another decade or two, the lowest cost supplier hubs may be in yet another corner of Asia, or in Africa, or even in Europe or the Americas?

But I doubt the trend to find and utilize the lowest-cost, best quality suppliers will ever again reverse, especially since the past decade has seen the introduction of technology – like web-based PLM solutions – designed to support the special problems of product design and realization on a global stage. Without the technology, the drawbacks of manual processes – the inefficiencies and the inability to scale – would eventually swamp the system. But the technology that is available today transcends these limitations and enables the processes of global product planning, design, development, and sourcing.

Our customers explain it best. Nicolas Thibault is head of the private label products group at INTERSPORT France. He explains, “Budgets will not improve any time soon, yet our goals and targets have increased. The answer is to use enterprise PLM and improve efficiency, to do more with less and improve market position.”

Another customer, Italian ski and sports apparel maker Colmar, puts the choice to invest in PLM in these terms. Colmar’s managing director Giulio Colombo said recently, “The current downturn will subside. Investing now in PLM, sourcing and profitability planning is a strategic move that will enable us to improve our underlying business processes, be more responsive to our consumers, and position us to extend our leadership in our markets.”

Interestingly, when discussing the benefits of a PLM system, both customers note that a quick return on investment and system ease-of-use are high priorities for them.

Our PLM solution, Centric 8, has evolved dramatically since its introduction, and that evolution has been customer driven. Our philosophy is to provide a modular, flexible set of applications that can be easily adapted to changing business processes, without re-implementation. Robust functionality in the product development, sourcing, calendar management and line planning areas were important to our customers, and those capabilities are part of our solution set.

Then, when customers told us they needed tools that would enhance their visibility into how changes in supply costs, currency exchange rates, or customer contract pricing requirements would affect their ability to achieve gross margin targets, we developed those tools and made them part of Centric 8.

Or, when customers alerted us to their impending need for 10 + 2 compliance visibility and management, we developed that capability and folded it into our PLM solution, before the U.S. government began requiring 10 + 2 reporting.

In the fall of 2009, Centric’s first Customer Advisory Board meeting was a tremendous success. Our customers communicated clearly with our executive management and development teams. They helped us understand their priorities and the business issues and trends they see that will affect their future demands on their Centric technology investment.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is immensely important today, and PLM plays a vital role in helping companies monitor and manage their compliance requirements. Monitoring the shifting requirements of Compliance Management is yet another example of how product teams have to do more with less.

Several considerations are key for successful CSR systems. First, the Compliance Management tools must be completely integrated with the rest of product and sourcing information. Second, the Compliance Management has to be extremely easy to use so that both sides of the compliance equation – brand owners and their supplier-partners – can update compliance information readily and without undue burden. Third, Compliance Management should be sufficiently flexible so that users can change their tracking as CSR requirements fluctuate.

Ultimately, the goal of a robust, PLM-based Compliance Management system is to provide brand managers with the visibility to quickly identify potential problems and address those issues before they become social or financial liabilities.

Very true – our industry is constantly changing and alliances are a hallmark of that change. Centric is focused first and foremost on providing our customers with the technology solutions they need to succeed. If an alliance can contribute to that goal, that’s great! But our focus remains on understanding the needs of the fashion and consumer goods industries and developing solutions to meet those needs and return real benefits, quickly!