PLM for apparel design and marketing turns the biggest challenges in a trend-driven business into sustainable competitive advantage. By implementing product lifecycle management (PLM) across key product development processes, apparel wholesalers and retailers are able to rapidly react to changing consumer trends, improve the productivity of their globalized supply chain and deliver quality garments. Siemens’ PLM solutions enable apparel manufacturers to rapidly react to rising consumer trends and quickly convert these trends into new garments that can be delivered to market on-time and on-budget.

Merchandisers, designers, production planners, quality control and supply chain participants leverage PLM so that they can communicate and collaborate through a single product-driven and process-oriented knowledge base that enables your company to successfully launch its products on a systematic and repeatable basis. By allowing these team members to globally collaborate, PLM:
- Ensures timely completion of your product development activities
- Improves the efficiency of individual development processes
- Drives consistent and continuous process improvement
- Increases organizational agility and speed-to-market PLM’s business value

By improving the efficiency of your product development processes, PLM enables your enterprise to deliver products in a systematic and controlled manner. PLM facilitates consistent (i.e., repeatable, reportable and predictable) processes that you can use to manage garment development. PLM provides decision makers with visibility to all new products and product lines, thereby enabling you to quickly leverage materials, knowledge, processes and technology from one product or brand initiative to another.

Early in the R&D phase of the product lifecycle, PLM enables your enterprise to define and exchange new design concepts, color palettes, fabrics, trims and other raw materials simply by identifying key pieces of information and inviting diverse teams to review and comment.

Your enterprise can make key design decisions based on up-to-date and highly accurate information that can be easily recorded and subsequently analyzed.

As product development turns these concepts into actual product, you can leverage PLM to track all of the activities associated with raw material development, color and lab dip approval, as well as to manage garment specification and vendor quality. You can use PLM to establish detailed time and action calendars that drive specific development activities, as well as information workflows both within your company and across your supply chain. In addition, you can establish event triggers to provide instant feedback about your development timelines, thereby enabling you to avoid critical delays and missed milestones.

PLM is especially valuable because it allows you to bring a systematic and repeatable methodology to the world of garment design and development. PLM organizes key components of your garment design and development processes around the styles, raw materials, colors, vendors and costing data that define your product.

Best practices for apparel companies
- Managing critical product development processes
- Extending the value of your intellectual assets
- Enabling cost effective and flexible collaboration
- Facilitating insightful and proactive development tracking