PLM Goes Mobile: How Centric Apps Take PLM Out of the Office

Do you have a special notebook in your bag full of handwritten notes and sketches that you would be lost without? Do you come back from every vendor visit with your luggage full of paper files and a phone full of photos to combine later, type up and send to your team?

If the answer is yes, you need to lighten your luggage and digitally transform the way you work with Centric PLM mobile apps.

There are 15 mobile apps in the Centric PLM™ ecosystem, helping everyone from designers to salespeople. In this blog post, we’ll focus on four of them: Inspirations, Material Sample, Capture It and Fit Review.

Apparel companies typically have people traveling to markets and trade shows all over the globe, taking a phone or camera to gather inspirational ideas from fabrics, colors, patterns and images. They then have to organize these photos and accompanying notes, upload them and communicate them back to their team.

Inspirations is an app that allows you to capture and upload images directly to theme boards in Centric PLM in real time from anywhere. Using the native camera features of your phone or tablet, you can start working on themes and building a shopping report, line report or even a draft concept for a new season on the spot.

Images can be edited before they are uploaded using familiar photo editing tools such as filters and cropping, and you can add comments to let your team know exactly what you’re thinking. Like all Centric PLM apps, Inspirations also works in offline mode with images queued to upload when you’re connected again.

Similarly, material developers collect material samples, photos and vendor information on research trips, and order samples to be sent directly to them. Material Sample offers a way to keep track of previously used materials as well as materials that are being explored and tested.

Use the app to capture material images and detailed information, and either enter them directly into Centric PLM’s materials library or keep them in a ‘staging library’ so that you can organize them, order samples, and decide whether to adopt materials. If you do, you can promote a sample directly to the materials library without reentering information.

Snap a picture of the material, edit it, attach comments and add as much information as you need, including vendor details, costs and minimum order quantities, then upload it directly to Centric. No more waiting for material developers and factory partners to send you long emails and spreadsheets – Material Sample streamlines the process of assessing potential materials, saving you time and money.

Capture It is for the next stage of creation, helping designers and development teams involved in the process of creating styles to easily update the style record, images and product information. Rather than taking photos, editing them on a desktop, finding the relevant style and attaching them, Capture It cuts out steps so you can use your phone to take photos, edit them and upload them directly to PLM.

Capture It is designed for easy collaboration. If a designer wants to get their team’s opinion on several different button styles, for instance, they can quickly upload pictures to the system so people can attach comments and add new images to compare – no matter where they are in the world.

Photos and images can be uploaded directly from the phone’s camera in real time, from the gallery of previously uploaded images, or from saved images (e.g. from online searches or competitor sites).

This app is for technical developers to use when evaluating physical samples. Instead of capturing measurements, technical specifications and evaluation comments using paper and photos that have to be collated back at your desk and handed off to other team members to make adjustments, fit evaluations can take place in real time using mobile devices.

Fit Review allows technical developers to access evaluations created on desktops, record values and capture notes during reviews. All of the information is published directly to PLM in the background and available when you go back to your desk.

Accountability is a breeze with Fit Review, as a clear record of-who made what changes when- means you’ll never have to reconstruct a paper trail. The ability to edit and mark up photos without another tool such as Photoshop streamlines the process, making it possible to do everything related to fit reviews in one place.

Mobile apps are part of our everyday life as technology users – why not use them to make work life easier? Centric Software’s mobile apps for PLM empower your teams to capture information and images on the go, speed up decision-making processes and reduce time to market, ultimately increasing your margins.