Bianco Footwear & Geac to invest for growing retail business
18 Oct '05
3 min read
Bianco Footwear, the European designer and retailer of men's and women's shoes, has invested US$91,000 in an end-to-end Product Lifecycle Management software suite from Geac to help support its rapidly growing retail business and more effectively handle complex collections. Bianco Footwear has a three-year plan to grow its number of European stores by 160 percent, to 300 outlets.
Bianco currently is implementing a PLM solution from RunTime, Geac's specialist division serving the apparel and footwear industry; it is expected to go live in 2005. Core to the solution is Geac's QuestACP ( Advanced Collection Planning), QuestPDM (Product Data Management), Quest Workflow and Quest Integration Engine. Geac's suite of design software will integrate with Bianco's existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from Microsoft Axapta.
Thomas Schultz Petersen, International Product Manager for Bianco Footwear, said: "Our new Geac PLM software will help us particularly in our pre-production activities to generate and adhere to new footwear collections in line with precise and diverse customer needs. The process of managing collections used to be conducted 'in our heads' and supported by a manual spreadsheet system. But with every new market we enter, the complexity of collections grows exponentially. So now that we're in nine markets and we have 12 collections a year - together with a number of small express drops - we're now looking forward to visualising and automating this difficult process with QuestACP."