The next generation of PLM software for fashion is helping merchandisers harness data across the supply chain to create collections that speak to the digital marketplace.
It’s every fashion merchandiser’s worst nightmare. You’ve crunched the numbers on last year’s sales, kept a watchful eye on marketplace forecasts and identified the next set of trends coming over the horizon. You’ve carefully selected fabrics and styles for the upcoming season, negotiated with suppliers to make sure your collection plan stays within budget, and put together an airtight production schedule that will get the right products into stores just as those trends are hitting their peak. Then disaster strikes. A fabric delivery goes missing and turns up at the wrong location
A prototype is rejected because it looks nothing like the original design. The grading on a series of styles is completely off and needs to be redone from scratch. Suddenly, you’re one month behind in your product development schedule and you’ve missed some key delivery deadlines. The clock is ticking and if you don’t figure out a solution soon, you risk missing out on the entire trend—and all the valuable sales that go along with it. How did you end up here? And what can you do make sure that it doesn’t happen again? With the best of PLM technology at your fingertips, you and your merchandising teams will have everything you need to stay one step ahead of the digital generation.
Our latest e-guide, “PLM for Merchandisers: Create Better Collections, Get Them to Market Faster”, demonstrates how today’s apparel PLM software has evolved beyond yesterday’s design, mobilizing new technologies to help fashion merchandisers produce styles that hit home with digital consumers.
Scenarios like this are becoming all too familiar as production cycles get shorter and supply chains get longer and more unwieldy. Today’s digital consumers have made the fast pace of fashion even faster as they leap from trend to trend faster than the speed of fiber-based broadband. Not only do they want high-quality, personalized products that speak to who they are as individuals, they want them right away—and at the lowest possible price. In this new fashion landscape, a single Instagram post can light up demand for a product overnight, skewering the best-laid collection plans and leaving companies scrambling to keep up.
Meanwhile, supply chains have gone increasingly global, with teams often spread out across different countries or different continents. With product development teams under enormous pressure to deliver to market quickly, there is little margin for error or miscommunication, yet never has it been more challenging to communicate between departments, or track everything that’s going on at every stage of the supply chain. The pressure is on and the stakes are high, but the good news is that solutions exist. The same technology that created the millennials’ need for speed can also be harnessed to facilitate better ways of working that will help you meet your deadlines and get to market faster.
While a variety of PLM solutions are available on the market, Lectra has the only one designed by fashion experts for fashion experts. The result is an intelligent solution that adapts to you and your processes, instead of the other way around. Our PLM solution doesn’t just speed up time to market, it takes product lifecycle management into a new era, with unique, innovative features that simplify trend forecasting and data analysis, and address fashion-specific DAM and PCM pain points.
Lectra’s PLM is designed to integrate seamlessly with different systems across the fashion supply chain, aggregating and analyzing structured and unstructured data from suppliers, creative teams, stores and clients. This gives merchandising teams the power to analyze trends in real time; unlock consumer insights; focus on the right products, meet deadlines along the development timeline; deliver on sales forecasts; and maintain 360° visibility over the entire supply chain. And because we know that you don’t have a second to lose, our PLM takes half the time to implement than most standard solutions on the market. Its modern interface is intuitive and easy to use, so your teams can get up to speed and back to business as quickly as possible. Even better, its social-media-inspired design makes collaboration fun, while features like drag and drop, smart technology and embedded plugins save you precious minutes that could be put to better use.
Last but not least, it goes without saying that today’s PLM should be accessible anywhere, at any time That’s why we chose to go with a cloud-based solution that is optimized for use on a wide variety of devices. The days of bulky, storage-sucking phone apps are over. Our fully responsive, browser-based interface provides a great experience whether on desktop, mobile or tablet, so your teams can stay connected and in sync, even when they’re on the go. With the best of PLM technology at your fingertips, you and your merchandising teams will have everything you need to stay one step ahead of the digital generation, planning collections, rolling with the punches, and getting the right styles into the right stores, in time to cash in on the right trends.
Download our e-guide and start putting the next generation of PLM technology to work for you.