CHICAGO — After rolling out technology to streamline product development at its home office, Patagonia is looking to extend the application deeper into the global supply chain.
This software, called product life cycle management, or PLM, is gaining favor among apparel companies seeking improved visibility into each stage of product development. A major goal is faster speed to market, but that can only happen when each department is in sync on timetables every step of the way — from design concept and costing to sourcing, production and distribution.
Patagonia completed the rollout of PTC’s FlexPLM software to 100 employees at its Ventura, Calif., headquarters in June. The company’s move to take the technology global — to agents and factories overseas — is to be announced on Monday.
PLM already is beginning to yield benefits, Mike Busch, Patagonia director of information services, said during a Webcast Tuesday. Before the rollout, employees spent as much as 50 percent of their time trying to find information they needed to do their jobs, or waiting for it to be furnished by others, he said.
“It was difficult for us to look at a financial view related to product selection or distribution channel,” Busch said. “And the development calendar was very much out of sync with the fiscal-year calendar. So the finance guys were always hounding the design guys with, ‘Well how much is this going to cost us?'”
It’s not a unique situation for apparel companies, he said, and it became clear that growth at Patagonia would be hindered without “some sort of technology fix.”
“When you have an environment like that, your time-to-market calendar becomes limited,” Busch said. “It takes more time to get product through the development cycle and to market.” Now, that information is centralized and everyone can access accurate data relevant to their jobs.
However, the implementation has not been without its challenges. Integrating the new technology with existing, customized software was tough, Busch said. And employees had to be persuaded to swap the spreadsheet-based system they had grown comfortable with for a new Web-based system.
Even something as seemingly trivial as data entry presents challenges. “You can’t expect designers to become data entry clerks,” Busch said.
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Companies adopting PLM need to think through whether data capture for product specifications and other information is to be centralized or decentralized at the design stage, he said. Privately owned Patagonia tried it both ways and opted for a hybrid approach.
“Global process visibility” is the next goal, Busch added. “We haven’t rolled it out globally yet, but that is coming up. We are going to integrate the supply chain and make information available to [agents and factories] as well as ask them to provide more information, so we can get rid of all the faxing back and forth.”