Paris (France), December 7, 2006 – Lectra, the world leader in CAD/CAM software, equipment and related services dedicated to the fashion business, announces that leading Canadian children’s wear retailer, Please Mum, selected Lectra for the deployment of its fashion-dedicated Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) offering. Lectra Fashion PLM will enable Please Mum to accelerate and rationalize its product and collections development processes and optimize the collaborative work of all participants in real time. 

Please Mum opened its first store near Vancouver in 1986. Today the company provides Canadian consumers with fashionable children’s wear and accessories through 86 retail outlets.  

“By partnering with Lectra we see a great opportunity to shorten our product development cycle and at the same time give ourselves the possibility to push more designs through the pre- production process so that we will have more choices for the final assortment,” said Anthony Findlay, Vice President for Procurement at Please Mum.

The Product Development application is at the heart of Lectra’s Fashion PLM offering; it will enable Please Mum to organize, manage and share all data related to the development of a product or collection – including themes, models, materials, colors, technical specifications, patterns, bills of materials, suppliers and costs. 

The Workflow Management application will allow Please Mum to organize and control activities related to its collection projects, synchronize the work of all participants involved in product development and identify bottlenecks and potential delays in real time. 

A genuine partnership is established between Please Mum and Lectra to define the organization of the project, guarantee its success and ensure an optimal transfer of competencies. The investment includes a full package of Lectra’s high value-added services, including installation, training and implementation.

Lectra’s expert consultants perform a detailed study of the company’s product and collections development cycles, and synchronize them with the PLM project in order to respect all constraints and lead times linked to collections in progress, while progressively providing all the added value of a highly structuring solution. All implementation steps are based on a methodology and rigorous tools, conceived with and for customers. 

“We are extremely excited to work with Lectra’s Fashion PLM offering,” said Anthony Findlay. “We are confident that the benefits of this offering will accelerate our processes and transform the way we develop our products and collections.” 

“Lectra’s Fashion PLM solution represents the most comprehensive offering dedicated to the fashion market today,” said David Rode, President of Lectra North America. “A fully configurable, 100% Web-based solution, it enables customers like Please Mum to overcome the challenges they face today, such as responding to increasingly frequent collections turnover and optimizing the collaborative work of all internal participants and company partners in real time.”