The past few years have seen the fashion industry show a significantly increasing passion for product lifecycle management (PLM) methodology. Generally speaking, a fashion PLM solution is a tailored PLM solution (compared with the general or comprehensive PLM) with extra functionality that serves the specificities of this industry in order to help the manufacturers and retailers of fashion goods (including apparel, footwear, accessories, etc.) to achieve more efficient product development, reduced costs, and better collaboration and control throughout the entire supply chain.
On the vendor side, established PLM players are expanding their solutions for the fashion industry; and experienced enterprise software providers in the fashion vertical are enhancing their PLM capabilities, resulting in a mushrooming of fashion PLM solutions in the market. On the user side, the adoption rate keeps growing. However, the question of how fashion companies can benefit from PLM in an optimal way remains unanswered. This question lies in many areas ranging from strategic planning, to solution selection, to system implementation, and to post-implementation operations. No doubt, many fashion players need more time to better understand what PLM is as a management methodology—and what PLM can do in terms of functionality before they can more confidently jump on the PLM bandwagon.
When we talk about PLM methodology in the context of the fashion business, recognizing the specificities of the fashion industry is as important as understanding what PLM is in the generic setting—if not more important. I have learned from a vendor that it originally used its "traditional" PLM solution (for industries such as automotive and aerospace) for the fashion industry, hoping it would perform well after some modifications. The results were not so successful until the vendor thoroughly rebuilt the solution for its fashion customers. To my understanding, a fashion PLM solution won't be a success unless the “fashion” part has been well taken care of.
The Specificities of the Fashion Industry
What makes the fashion industry so different when it comes to applying the PLM methodology? A look at the product features of fashion goods and the business processes of the fashion industry may help answer the question.
Product features
In the past, PLM used to deal with products with complicated structure and configurations. However, this is not the case in the fashion industry, where product structure is quite simple and flat. For many fashion companies, although the structure of each individual product is not complicated, product variety is the pain point in management—for each season, there may be different product lines, multiple styles under each line, and color and size variations for each style. In other words, the structure of the product line may be complicated, resulting in the need for tremendous efforts to manage the integrity of product line information.
In addition, fashion products change constantly from one season to another (or even within the same season) under a rigid time frame. Fashion goods now have a very short cycle time—sometimes just a few weeks from the time the designer has an idea to the time the product hits the street.
Business processes
The fashion business has established its own conventions for the product development process. From trend research to the physical item on the shelf, a fashion product may go through different stages in the form of storyboards, sketches, patterns, prototype, multiple types of samples, and so on. Within these process conventions, there are a lot of informalities. Fashion players do need to maintain the accuracy of their product data, but they are also fighting with large product quantities and short cycle times (as mentioned previously). Thus, the full process for tracking engineering changes is highly necessary for making a change to an automobile in development, but it is too lengthy for modifying a design detail of a jacket.
Today, many fashion companies rely on offshore production. While benefitting from low labor costs, they have to face drawbacks in areas such as on-time delivery, quality control, and collaboration between product development and production due to an elongated value chain. To address these issues, fashion players have to streamline the supply chain by working closely with suppliers using accurate and timely product data.
Challenges for a Fashion PLM Solution
The following are a few challenges that a fashion PLM solution has to address in order to be successful.
1.
Being secure enough to hold product definition information, but efficient and flexible enough to handle the sheer volume and variety of product and the fast pace of fashion business processes.
2.
Being well tuned to fashion business processes and user habits—fashion designers are not engineers.
3.
Although a traditional PLM system doesn't necessarily include sourcing functionality, it has become a critical capability for fashion PLM.
4.
The wide managerial span of a fashion PLM system requires effective integration between PLM and other systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM).
A two-layer Model for Fashion PLM Functionality
Above analysis mainly suggests that a successful fashion PLM solution should be able to bring all the benefits that the PLM methodology has to offer, and all the functionalities that specifically support the unique needs of the fashion business. Following this idea, we can separate fashion PLM functionality into two major categories: process-specific and non-process-specific.
The difference between the two is relatively clear. Process-specific functionality simulates fashion business processes and provides specific capabilities and interfaces to support each task or job function (such as line planning, design, sourcing, etc). Non-process-specific functionality is more generic and cross-functional, and often plays a supporting role. Examples for the second category include data vaulting, classification, workflow, etc. In other words, non-process-specific functionality is that running behind the scenes or in common amongst different job functions in order to maintain data integrity, increase productivity, and facilitate collaboration. For instance, a fashion designer may be tasked with modifying a design detail, retrieving the current design information, performing the modification, and then sending the change to his/her manager for approval mainly through the process-specific functionality called “design management.” However, without the support from non-process-specific functionality (e.g., routing, searching, checking documents in/out), “design management” can't sustain itself.
SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/a-two-layer-model-for-fashion-plm-functionality-19953/
On the vendor side, established PLM players are expanding their solutions for the fashion industry; and experienced enterprise software providers in the fashion vertical are enhancing their PLM capabilities, resulting in a mushrooming of fashion PLM solutions in the market. On the user side, the adoption rate keeps growing. However, the question of how fashion companies can benefit from PLM in an optimal way remains unanswered. This question lies in many areas ranging from strategic planning, to solution selection, to system implementation, and to post-implementation operations. No doubt, many fashion players need more time to better understand what PLM is as a management methodology—and what PLM can do in terms of functionality before they can more confidently jump on the PLM bandwagon.
When we talk about PLM methodology in the context of the fashion business, recognizing the specificities of the fashion industry is as important as understanding what PLM is in the generic setting—if not more important. I have learned from a vendor that it originally used its "traditional" PLM solution (for industries such as automotive and aerospace) for the fashion industry, hoping it would perform well after some modifications. The results were not so successful until the vendor thoroughly rebuilt the solution for its fashion customers. To my understanding, a fashion PLM solution won't be a success unless the “fashion” part has been well taken care of.
The Specificities of the Fashion Industry
What makes the fashion industry so different when it comes to applying the PLM methodology? A look at the product features of fashion goods and the business processes of the fashion industry may help answer the question.
Product features
In the past, PLM used to deal with products with complicated structure and configurations. However, this is not the case in the fashion industry, where product structure is quite simple and flat. For many fashion companies, although the structure of each individual product is not complicated, product variety is the pain point in management—for each season, there may be different product lines, multiple styles under each line, and color and size variations for each style. In other words, the structure of the product line may be complicated, resulting in the need for tremendous efforts to manage the integrity of product line information.
In addition, fashion products change constantly from one season to another (or even within the same season) under a rigid time frame. Fashion goods now have a very short cycle time—sometimes just a few weeks from the time the designer has an idea to the time the product hits the street.
Business processes
The fashion business has established its own conventions for the product development process. From trend research to the physical item on the shelf, a fashion product may go through different stages in the form of storyboards, sketches, patterns, prototype, multiple types of samples, and so on. Within these process conventions, there are a lot of informalities. Fashion players do need to maintain the accuracy of their product data, but they are also fighting with large product quantities and short cycle times (as mentioned previously). Thus, the full process for tracking engineering changes is highly necessary for making a change to an automobile in development, but it is too lengthy for modifying a design detail of a jacket.
Today, many fashion companies rely on offshore production. While benefitting from low labor costs, they have to face drawbacks in areas such as on-time delivery, quality control, and collaboration between product development and production due to an elongated value chain. To address these issues, fashion players have to streamline the supply chain by working closely with suppliers using accurate and timely product data.
Challenges for a Fashion PLM Solution
The following are a few challenges that a fashion PLM solution has to address in order to be successful.
1.
Being secure enough to hold product definition information, but efficient and flexible enough to handle the sheer volume and variety of product and the fast pace of fashion business processes.
2.
Being well tuned to fashion business processes and user habits—fashion designers are not engineers.
3.
Although a traditional PLM system doesn't necessarily include sourcing functionality, it has become a critical capability for fashion PLM.
4.
The wide managerial span of a fashion PLM system requires effective integration between PLM and other systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM).
A two-layer Model for Fashion PLM Functionality
Above analysis mainly suggests that a successful fashion PLM solution should be able to bring all the benefits that the PLM methodology has to offer, and all the functionalities that specifically support the unique needs of the fashion business. Following this idea, we can separate fashion PLM functionality into two major categories: process-specific and non-process-specific.
The difference between the two is relatively clear. Process-specific functionality simulates fashion business processes and provides specific capabilities and interfaces to support each task or job function (such as line planning, design, sourcing, etc). Non-process-specific functionality is more generic and cross-functional, and often plays a supporting role. Examples for the second category include data vaulting, classification, workflow, etc. In other words, non-process-specific functionality is that running behind the scenes or in common amongst different job functions in order to maintain data integrity, increase productivity, and facilitate collaboration. For instance, a fashion designer may be tasked with modifying a design detail, retrieving the current design information, performing the modification, and then sending the change to his/her manager for approval mainly through the process-specific functionality called “design management.” However, without the support from non-process-specific functionality (e.g., routing, searching, checking documents in/out), “design management” can't sustain itself.
SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/a-two-layer-model-for-fashion-plm-functionality-19953/
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