How APP Group Boosts Efficiency and Visibility Across Teams with Centric PLM

As VP of production and sourcing, my main challenge is the lack of visibility and transparency across my design and technical teams, and between our head and remote offices. I used to arrive at work and immediately jump into a storm of time-consuming, back-and-forth communication to clarify minute details about products in development and make sure the right people had the most up-to-date information. During the development period, we were constantly retouching technical files and trying to share data. We needed to create a seamless flow of information that would give us visibility of the full development cycle.

Monitoring details and making sure we didn’t miss a fabric change was eating up all our time—time we could have spent on creating great products. Our processes and systems were very manual and based around Excel, web-based document sharing systems and email.

When we started looking for a fashion PLM solution, we knew that we needed a modern system that could be accessed from anywhere in the world, at any time. Because we work across remote offices in locations including China, Paris, New York and Toronto, time differences can be an issue.

For example, the technical team might make changes to files and upload them to our server. They must communicate these changes and discuss them with the design team or request some new information. However, the design team could be halfway around the world and might not see the changes or respond to a request for another 12 hours due to the time difference.

Because Centric PLM is mobile and web based, we can access it on the go or outside of office hours. This functionality is particularly appealing for Millennial employees who have been immersed in the world of instant web access and mobile apps for much of their lives.

Because we are a global company, it’s very important to us that we can all communicate effectively across different languages. Centric PLM helps us to ”speak the same language” in terms of sharing product information, but in a more literal sense, the solution’s multi-language support eases communication and product localization.

We’ve been in business for 20 years, and we’re growing at a rapid pace—opening new stores and focusing more on direct-to-consumer sales. Our existing systems couldn’t cope with the challenges of growth, such as producing more styles at a faster pace for more markets and channels. At an executive level, we knew that we needed to speed up the product development and launch process in order to stay competitive, but that we couldn’t possibly push teams to work faster using the manual tools they had.

We like to give our employees the best possible solutions, and Centric PLM provides the most suitable and workable solution for our broader business challenges and day-to-day technical challenges. Centric PLM makes it possible for talented and creative people to focus on the jobs they were hired to do, resulting in greater team efficiency, less user frustration and better time management, ultimately empowering APP Group’s continued growth.

It’s a win-win for employees and the business!