To reduce their time to market, apparel makers are moving ahead with plans to install product lifecycle management software.
Liz Claiborne is moving all its brands to Parametric Technology Corp.’s Windchill software for managing its product development process.
The software will streamline communications, cut Claiborne’s time to market, help the company be more on trend and cut costs, said Kerry Fogarty, director of application development for the company. “As a manager in our Hong Kong office said, we’ve got so many e-mails going back and forth, we’re like an e-mail company that wants to develop product,” said Fogarty. “We’re trying to streamline that, and make it more visual and more actionable.”
Windchill will unite product data and imagery, he said. The software is highly configurable — so Claiborne can define database fields and hierarchies on the fly as needed for a particular product or brand — and will work with the software Claiborne is already using for design, including Adobe Illustrator and Lectra’s U4ia.
Claiborne started looking for product lifecycle management software in 2004. It chose Windchill because of its multiple features, ability to support many users and because it is Web-based. Now Windchill is installed at the group’s subsidiary Mexx of the Netherlands, where it will be used for production sometime this quarter, said Fogarty.
Later this year, some of Claiborne’s U.S. brands will start using the software. The global rollout to thousands of company employees will be completed in fewer than five years, Fogarty said.
The company will also connect key suppliers to the software, he said. “This touches so many hands,” he said. “It’s one of the largest initiatives in the corporation. It’s a significantly challenging undertaking, but obviously it will be extremely rewarding.”
Apparel and footwear company Fila is also using PLM software from PTC to collapse the product development cycle. Before that can happen, however, Fila will use the software to eliminate production bottlenecks and improve accountability throughout marketing, design and development.
For example, the PLM system will reveal “who’s on time delivering against the calendar and who is not,” said Kristin Kohler, Fila’s vice president of global product and general manager. “We’ll know who is making all these changes in the development process in the timelines and outside the timelines that ultimately cost us money.”
Related Articles
You May Also Like
The company’s previous, Excel spreadsheet-based tracking system was error-prone and could not provide visibility into workflow processes, Kohler said. “We have not been able to effectively finalize product in time to commercialize it,” she said. “This [new system] will allow us to point to which product is final, which product is not final and why the product is not final.”
“They are going to get a lot of benefits in the quality of the information and that leads to the quality of the product,” said David Bassuk, principal and director of product management for Kurt Salmon Associates of New York. KSA worked with Claiborne and Fila on their PLM initiatives.
“For both companies, [PLM] is going to pay off significantly with margins, SG&A statements and speed to market,” Bassuk said.
PLM software is becoming a key technology and many apparel companies have adopted it in the last two years. This week, children’s clothes maker Artsana said it plans to use PLM software from Centric Software Inc.
“PLM is very popular today,” said Walter Wilhelm, president, Walter Wilhelm Associates of Salt Lake City. “Almost every major retailer, almost every major brand is moving from what were PDM systems, that didn’t ever really close that gap internationally, to PLM.”
Bassuk said PDM — or product data management software — gets a bad rap these days because as a stand-alone solution, it cannot deliver on the need for speed and innovation.
“You need to be fast. You need to know what is going on and you need to get it there in a consumer-right, trend-right way,” Bassuk said. “And that’s where PLM comes in. PLM is really the next generation of PDM.”