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"Simply changing processes — making them faster or less expensive, for example — is not enough," analyses Ms Nathalie Gondoin, PLM Mktg Director, Lectra Group, in a tech-talk with fibre2fashion team. 
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How Can Fashion Companies Turn the Biggest Challenges of a Trend-Driven Business into Sustainable Competitive Advantage Using PLM Solutions?
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Being competitive means creating value! It means eliminating obstacles to growth and profitability; minimizing delay in delivering products to market; reducing costs without compromising quality, and leaping time and distance barriers to improve collaboration.
Consumers want it all. They expect a fresh selection of innovative styles with good quality and attractive prices — every four to six weeks.
To meet these demands, fashion brands and retailers collaborate with designers, manufacturers, and suppliers around the world, which introduces complicated logistics, complex communication and unpredictable costs into an already difficult business scenario. To cope, many fashion companies now deliver up to ten collections a year, in limited quantities, to stay as close as possible to seasonal trends while minimizing the effect of sourcing cost fluctuations and avoiding markdowns, close-outs, and out-of-stock situations. They also are beginning to seek consumer feedback, trying to discern new tastes and trends even earlier.
Yet simply cutting costs or speeding up processes only increases the existing stress on traditional fashion design, planning, marketing, product development, sourcing and manufacturing processes. The processes themselves must be changed to meet today’s critical business needs. Fashion businesses must be able to integrate business and financial planning processes with collaborative design and development processes, across parallel development cycles and across cultural and geographic boundaries which cannot be overcome simply by making things faster.
This is why PLM is becoming a fact of life for successful fashion companies.
However, the choice of a PLM solution is not as simple as it seems. The outcome of any process is only as good as the quality of the process input. Simply changing processes — making them faster or less expensive, for example — is not enough. Fashion companies seek to fundamentally change how they design, plan, produce, manufacture, and sell their products. Beyond accelerating or removing inefficiencies from business and creative processes, only a fashion dedicated PLM solution fundamentally improves how all fashion lifecycle participants actually work and collaborate and helps fashion companies deliver more and more fresh, innovative products while strengthening brand identity and maintaining profitability.
At Lectra, we believe that an efficient PLM solution for fashion should have the following fundamental characteristics:
- A collaborative work environment for the design, development and engineering of fashion products, whereby designers, brand managers, technical developers, pattern designers and manufacturing partners can easily collaborate on shared visual and text data to simulate, specify and evaluate products throughout the development process.
- Software applications that embed the technical know-how of a fashion product as well fashion-dedicated work-methods and best practices to automate and simplify development tasks and increase quality and control over supply chain performance.
- Management-level process-control and decision-making tools to manage, monitor and synchronize parallel activities, tasks and workflows across the product lifecycle.
Finally, it is fundamental that the implementation of a PLM solution be defined and executed by a team of experts with significant experience of developing projects in multiple fashion industry segments. This way, they can quickly and easily adapt to the company’s specific constraints and environment characteristics and deliver a value-added service. |
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