Creating and marketing men’s belts, small leather goods, neckwear, luggage, casual bags, jewelry, seasonal footwear, and gifts, Randa collaborates with 75 marquee brands including Levi’s, Dockers, Tommy Hilfiger, Kenneth Cole, Geoffrey Beene, Tommy Bahama, Jonathan Adler, Nautica, Timberland, Countess Mara, Guess, and Williamson-Dickies. Randa is the leading global resource for fashion, lifestyle, luxury, and private-branded men’s accessories and in-store merchandise services provided through retailers in all channels of distribution, worldwide.
Business need
Randa has a large, global supply chain network across its 75 brands. The company has clear communication processes and clear expectations from partners, but the lack of a centralized database made it difficult to collaborate effectively with partners. Emailbased file sharing and excessive dependence on localized spreadsheets made it difficult to enforce process compliance. Also, since a major part of their supplier network was based in China, language was a challenge.
Randa’s vision was to have a truly global, well connected and collaborative vendor/partner network. They needed supply chain partners to collaborate with them throughout the product design lifecycle, sharing and collaborating on tech packs, sample requests, quotes, and more. They also needed a PLM system that was highly visual so employees in design, merchandising and packaging divisions could reference the same information and new employees could be brought up to speed quickly.
Supporting a "global attitude" with YuniquePLM
Randa Accessories decided to implement YuniquePLM to support its global product development. With YuniquePLM, all details are supported by images which makes life more comfortable for designers, merchandisers as well as suppliers. YuniquePLM became the product development team’s single version of the truth.
The initial implementation was carried out for the leather goods division in the U.S. Subsequent roll-outs covered the luggage, jewelry, footwear and neckwear divisions across multiple geographies including Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, the U.K., Italy, South Africa, Australia and China. YuniquePLM ensured real-time collaboration with global supply chain partners. It ensured regular vendor participation, improved partner communication and facilitated quicker responses.
Using YuniquePLM, suppliers accessed the shared system via an Internet browser Dashboards that appear upon login clearly communicated status and expectations. With early participation in the product design process, the suppliers were also able to become more proactive and serve as true partners in the development process.
Executive sponsorship from Randa was a key element of the rollout’s success. Randa’s management team attended several sessions, jointly with the Gerber team to ensure that the project was on schedule and that the company addressed all questions and concerns from suppliers. Yunique’s globally-deployed team of PLM and industry experts were instrumental in ensuring that suppliers received comprehensive training in their local language. The global attitude was infectious and the project was driven by a very enthusiastic power-user team, which made the initial adoption and the subsequent global implementation very smooth.
Case highlights
The Client: Randa Accessories
Brief about client business: Randa is a global leader in lifestyle accessories. It designs, manufactures and markets belts, wallets, neckwear, small leather goods, luggage, backpacks, business cases and seasonal footwear.
The Challenge: Randa has offices in 11 countries across 5 continents and refers to production as “a global symphony” with tasks taking place from Hangzhou, China to Guatemala City.
The Solution: YuniquePLM’s powerful supplier collaboration functionality facilitated real-time collaboration with supply chain partners. It enables designers and merchandisers to share very detailed specification packages with suppliers and check the status of samples and production models right down to the style level. Gone are spreadsheets stored in multiple locations and emails flying constantly.
The Benefits: Regular vendor participation and real-time collaboration with supply chain partners ensure that issues surface before they affect product deadlines.
Key benefits
- Approximately two-days time cut from the sample development process
- Vendors collaborate more effectively by sharing comments and advising the status of samples and quotes on a daily basis
- All sample and quote information is kept together with corresponding styles and is easy to reference when required
- Vendors embraced YuniquePLM and are actively recommending process improvements
- Dashboards and reports on supplier login ensure that expectations from Randa are clear
