May 2nd, 2018

Centric Software Unveils Game-Changing Visual Studio Boards

CAMPBELL, Calif., May 2, 2018 – Building on its strategy to develop innovations that drive retail transformation for brands, retailers and manufacturers, PLM leader Centric Software announces a new addition to the Centric Visual Innovation Platform (Centric VIP). Visual Studio Boards vitalizes idea creation and sharing for design studios and production teams. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to fashion, retail, footwear, outdoor, luxury and consumer goods companies to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Centric VIP, for visual, touch-based devices such as tablets and touchscreen televisions,is fully connected with Centric PLM and is a platform dedicated to mood, material, style, allocation, merchandising, line and sales boards. This innovative platform drives digital transformation and decision-making, significantly reducing time to market and generating major productivity gains for creative and technical teams as well as executives.

Visual Studio Boards are a highly collaborative, visual sandbox environment where designers can be creative and play yet also share ideas with other teams. Designers can pull in sketches, images, colors, materials and more from previous collections and desktop files as well as directly from a web browser, such as an image search or a trend service site. They can create new information on the fly and build ideas for products and collections. As ideas mature, product development and production teams add their input resulting in more creative, higher quality and higher margin products.

Information syncs seamlessly giving teams a global view of materials, colors and styles, and allowing them to make decisions and see changes live. Teams can be located in the same room or around the world and, as Centric VIP is system-agnostic, information can be drawn from Centric 8 PLM or other business systems such as ERP, PIM, DAM, etc.

Today, the design process revolves around paper-based, cumbersome ways of working: printed spreadsheets made into ‘books’ and large foam core boards filled with cut-outs, handwritten notes, post-its, stickers and other bits of information. These analog ways of working are extremely time-consuming to compile and prone to error, with output impossible to communicate and execute quickly and accurately. Creativity is often hampered due to the lack of easy to understand, clear information and time lost searching for details.

Visual Studio Boards make ideas flow smoothly from designers to product teams for commercialization and production. In this new digital space, designers and other teams can ideate without limits, evolve concepts to maturity and execute them in collaboration with one another to boost innovation and quality while drastically cutting time to market.

“Visual Studio Boards are a game-changing, completely market-driven innovation that transforms the design and ideation process,” says Chris Groves, President and CEO of Centric Software. “They let creativity flourish while also taking advantage of technical and production expertise to speed time to market, boost innovation and improve product quality.”

Centric Software (www.centricsoftware.com)

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley and offices in trend capitals around the world, Centric Software provides a Digital Transformation Platform for the most prestigious names in fashion, retail, footwear, luxury, outdoor and consumer goods. Centric Visual Innovation Platform (VIP) is a visual, fully digital collection of boards for touch-based devices like iPad, iPhone and large-scale, touch-screen televisions. Centric VIP transforms decision making and automates execution to truly collapse time to market and distance to trend. Centric’s flagship product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, Centric 8, delivers enterprise-class merchandise planning, product development, sourcing, business planning, quality, and collection management functionality tailored for fast-moving consumer industries. Centric SMB packages extended PLM including innovative technology and key industry learnings tailored for small businesses.

Centric Software has received multiple industry awards, including the Frost & Sullivan Global Product Differentiation Excellence Award in Retail, Fashion, and Apparel PLM in 2016 and Frost & Sullivan’s Global Retail, Fashion, and Apparel PLM Product Differentiation Excellence Award in 2012. Red Herring named Centric to its Top 100 Global list in 2013, 2015 and 2016.

Centric is a registered trademark of Centric Software. All other brands and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.