P.E Nation Handles Exceptional Growth with Centric PLM

Small Business, Rapid Growth

Despite celebrating exceptional growth, even during the Covid-19 pandemic, Mark Rogers, Head of Operations at P.E Nation, reflects on a time when teams felt the frustration and stress of working with multiple data sources. “A small business, rapid growth, increased SKU counts – we were increasing our range across different categories and we began to see pain points.” Fast forward a matter of months and that frustration has been improved thanks to Centric PLM™.

Teams now starting to manage all product-related data, including tech packs, from one single source of truth, immediately empowering teams and increasing overall business efficiency.

Active Meets Streetwear

Headquarted in Sydney, Australia and founded by fitness and fashion entrepreneurs Pip Edwards and Claire Tregoning, P.E Nation offers a new genre of fashion sports luxe athleisure and activewear.

Having grown substantially both nationally and internationally in recent years, P.E Nation continues the incline to global predominance. Its apparel categories are expanding, and it has released successful collaborations with brands including Speedo & H&M.

However, to manage this growth it became apparent the business needed to act quickly and streamline its way of working to optimize efficiency and agility throughout its processes.

PLM, the Natural Next Step

“Not having one source of truth or not intuitively knowing where to find things was challenging. Occasionally there were times when an incorrect style number was mistyped, or something wouldn’t get updated.

The bigger the business gets, the slower spreadsheets move and that leads to frustration as well,” explains Mark. “To scale a business properly, you need everything under one roof and PLM was the natural next step for us.”

P.E Nation selected Centric Software’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source and sell products to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

A One-Stop Shop

“We looked at a lot of PLM solutions, but we settled on Centric because simply, it made sense to us. The P.E Nation team is very creative in their approach to work so the link between Adobe Illustrator and Centric PLM means the design team can create a style in Illustrator and send it straight through for feedback.

The ability to have everything under one roof- tech packs, specs and costings makes things really straightforward,” explains Mark. The ease of the interface, the usability, the fact that we can generate reports out of it- it’s a one stop shop.”

Efficiency from the Onset

“I wasn’t expecting to see efficiency straight off. The feedback I’ve had back from the team is really positive, some people have completed their work before the deadline. They can see how user friendly it is and how much faster they can get their work done,” reveals Mark.

Efficiency & Accuracy

“In the next months I think we are going to see efficiencies, not only in creating styles but approving those styles too. Centric PLM will link to our sales tool, so as soon as a style is approved by sales, it’s pulled straight through into their system, which is phenomenal. No more mistakes or pulling through incorrect information.”

P.E Nation will integrate its suppliers with Centric PLM for maximum collaboration, to save time and ensure accuracy. “Rather than having to send an email, information will come straight from the system. You don’t have to open up a massive costing spreadsheet that takes half an hour to update because it’s so complicated.”