3COLOUR Saves Time and Increases BOM Accuracy with Centric PLM

Time for Change

“Despite 3COLOUR having a common goal to respond quickly and profitably to market demands, teams were not working together in a collaborative way. We knew there was a way to work more efficiently and creatively. Centric PLM™ was the solution.”

Fangtao Zhang, VP – R&D at 3COLOUR describes when the company identified the need for a powerful solution that would put all departments on the same page.

Successful Fashion Brand

3COLOUR was established in 1997 as the first brand under Excellent Fashion Garment (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd. 3COLOUR has dozens of branches and offices in more than 300 cities across China, and with more than 1,000 franchise stores, it has become the largest brand in the group.

Overcoming Challenges

Jinye Dai, Product Development Coordination Manager AT 3COLOUR describes how the complexity of 3COLOUR’s products caused problems when using Excel, “Adding collection, style and BOM related data one by one by hand resulted in a lot of errors.”

The ecommerce team were also grappling with challenges such as mixed R&D models operating in parallel, disorganized sample management and the need to respond rapidly and effectively predict product profitability in a short development cycle.

Long Lasting Partnership

3COLOUR successfully launched Centric Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) for product development, design and R&D teams in 2014, making them one of the earliest Centric Software customers in China.

Following the success of the project, 3COLOUR’s rapidly expanding e-commerce business also made the decision to implement Centric PLM in 2020.

Mr. Li, who heads up the 3COLOUR e-commerce team, says, “I have been considering implementing a PLM project for two years. The powerful capabilities of Centric PLM and the professional abilities of the Centric team are impressive. I believe that Centric PLM will help our e-commerce team save time, improve efficiency, control costs, speed up R&D and new product launch times. The project will lay the foundation for future development.”

“We expect to avoid past mistakes by leveraging a knowledge base and best practices within the PLM system, which will greatly reduce the error rate and improve efficiency in the future. Team members will have more time to focus on creative work, stimulating brand innovation,” he concludes.

Improving Accuracy and Efficiency

After just two seasons, 3COLOUR’s BOM accuracy increased from 70-80% to a very impressive 100%.

Centric PLM saves days of working time for designers and developers, enabling them to focus on creating new products.

“Working with Centric, there is no need to enter information more than once. For example, once I find the material code in the system then all the information relating to that material is readily available, so that I don’t have to re-enter the same material info many times,” says Dai.

More Time Spent Designing

Yanqun Wu, Chief Designer at 3COLOUR explains how Centric PLM has made her job easier and more enjoyable, “The best thing is with just one click, the system can automatically generate the style code.”

“Personally, I like using Centric because it saves me time and makes design work easier so I can spend more time on my job – which is designing.”

Team Spirit

Dai reveals what contributes to 3COLOUR and Centric Software’s productive longstanding relationship and why the company trust Centric to provide a digital foundation for their business, “The Centric team is very professional, very efficient and helpful whenever needed, sometimes even working overtime for us. We were very touched that they cared so much about our project.”

Zhang added, “I really enjoy working with Centric, they are a great partner.”

Promising Future Plans

“This project will now lead to future collaboration between Centric and Hangzhou Group. We look forward to working with Centric on our other brands,” say Zhang.