27 September, 2024

Centric Software Pioneers Fully Actionable Digital Whiteboard with Seamless PLM Integration to Optimize Product Assortments

Reduce SKUs and deliver the right product choices faster with Centric Visual Whiteboard

CAMPBELL, Calif., September 30, 2024 – Centric Software® is pleased to announce the release of Centric Visual Whiteboard™, the latest addition to the Centric Visual Boards™ family of connected digital boards already adopted by many leading brands and retailers worldwide. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products such as fashion, luxury, footwear, outdoor, home and related goods like cosmetics & personal care as well as multi-category retail to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Retail and grocery brands are shifting from the endless aisle concept to SKU prioritization that better meets consumer demands and has a positive financial impact. However, developing robust assortments is challenging, as marketing, product, design, merchandising and planning teams struggle with disconnected tools and systems. Teams frequently lose weeks manually pulling data from various sources to create cohesive presentations for seasonal collections and assortments. Information is often static; immediately out of date as soon as it is copied/pasted from one system to another and, critically, teams lack the ability to visually pivot collections based on various criteria such as delivery date, theme, price point, channel, region, color, size, etc. to ensure a robust, curated product offer.

Centric Visual Whiteboard is a dynamic, collaborative workspace that empowers marketing, designers, merchandisers and planners to visualize concepts and transition smoothly from ideation to production. This intuitive platform supports various use cases, from assembling seasonal assortments to preparing detailed linesheets and presentations.

Users of Centric Visual Whiteboard believe that it is a game-changing solution and report 99% time saving, equating to weeks or months, to produce outputs required by stakeholders for business-critical decisions. One European brand estimated annual savings of €800k in resources for inspiration board updates. “Creating a collection information presentation used to take a team of 5 to 10 Product Managers a full week, but now it can be done in two minutes,” says a high-end fashion jewelry brand.

“Centric Visual Whiteboard can be configured to the customer’s specific needs and its function depending on who is using it”, explains Humberto Roa, Vice President of Innovation at Centric Software.

“Centric Visual Whiteboard is a free-form or templated canvas where users can bring together real-time imagery and information related to products, styles, materials and associated attributes from multiple systems, and automatically group them in different ways, such as by price point or color or size or product family…. For designers or marketers, this might mean creating a concept brief or seasonal promotions. Through a merchandising lens, it could be creating visual line planning reports or developing a creative brief with product placeholders. Boards created using Centric Visual Whiteboard can be exported as slide decks to tools such as PowerPoint, quickly transforming collaborative sandboxing into presentations for internal or external stakeholders.”

Additional market feedback includes, “We bring in imagery and data points from PLM and ERP, adapt the layout for the specific audience, automatically group and sort products and download the canvas in seconds as a presentation or PDF. We save so much administrative time updating slides, as price and margin changes are automatically updated from our ERP solution. It’s an optimal collection visualization system for faster decision-making.”

“Centric Visual Whiteboard was developed hand-in-hand with our leading fashion, grocery and consumer goods brand and retail customers,” says Chris Groves, CEO of Centric Software. “Centric Visual Whiteboard solves multiple problems and is an innovative development for fashion, retail and consumer goods teams to drive better and faster decisions, resulting in both happier customers and improvements in financial performance.”

Learn more about Centric Visual Whiteboard.

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