The retail industry continues to evolve as consumer expectations, shopping behaviors and market conditions shift. Today's consumers are increasingly influenced by changing values, purchasing priorities and expectations for more personalized and seamless shopping experiences. According to EY’s latest Future Consumer Index, consumer values and perspectives continue to shape purchasing decisions and the future of retail.
As the industry continues to transform, retail product development must evolve alongside it. Retailers need a strong digital foundation to respond to changing consumer demands, adapt product strategies, improve operational efficiency and strengthen their brands in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
What is Retail Product Development?
Retail product development is the process of creating a new product, renewing an existing product, and bringing this product to the market. This includes the ideation process, research, planning, 3D designs, sourcing, costs and retail strategy.
Centric PLM™ and Digital Boards drive digital transformation for retailers. Businesses are able to develop products in all categories of consumer goods across multiple collections, price points, geographies and channels faster. The result: lower costs and higher product margins while still meeting compliance standards to better compete in today’s accelerating marketplace.
How Does Centric’s Technology Suite Boost Product Development for Retail Businesses Across the Globe?
Product development continues to evolve as brands and retailers face growing demands for faster time to market, greater product innovation and more efficient merchandising strategies. Managing complex product development workflows requires connected teams, centralized data and greater visibility across the product lifecycle. Centric's solutions provide an integrated digital platform that streamlines processes, strengthens collaboration and enables retailers to make more informed decisions from initial planning through product launch.
Product Development is Smoother and Easier
With Centric Pricing and Planning, brands and retailers can take control of their merchandising planning. This is particularly business-critical considering nearly 50% of new product introductions in the retail sector fail to meet sales targets. Retailers can differentiate themselves and eliminate guesswork from product development by integrating merchandising planning from the very start of product development. With Centric Pricing and Planning, teams can create ‘what-if’ queries using the cost scenarios feature and automatically calculate how product costs affect margins and pricing. Teams can complete mass updates with the click of a button, dramatically reducing the margin for error. Additionally, visibility increases from the initial line plan proposal to sales commitments and the recording of actuals.
Enables Creativity
PLM systems and Digital Boards enable seamless collaboration across distributed teams, departments and global markets. Retail product development requires input from multiple stakeholders, from designers and merchandisers to buyers and suppliers. Connected digital tools make it easier for teams to collaborate on sample reviews, design reviews and buying sessions as well as go-to-market meetings, regardless of location.
All product data and libraries are centralized, creating a real-time single source of truth so creative teams can focus on developing and managing cutting-edge new collections. Teams can easily incorporate information from previous seasons and conduct field research without spending hours searching for data. Digital Boards merge information from multiple systems and combine visuals and data to transform team collaboration and decision-making.
Data is Secure and Safe
Secure data sharing is critical for innovation. With Centric’s Retail solutions, teams can easily control what they share with vendors and suppliers while ensuring their data remains safe and secure. Access can be granted and controlled for individual users in an extremely flexible way, right down to custom attributes and permissions for each user. This helps streamline retail product development and other workflows while improving processes overall.
Real-Time Analytics are Easy
Centric’s online pivot tool with real-time analytics allows users to filter and sort by any metric (e.g., country of origin across the three most recent seasons). This enables teams to identify trends and quickly spot exceptions through visual cues so that items with the largest financial impact can be addressed first. Ultimately, this allows retailers to refine their business operations and improve margins.
Centric’s Retail Solutions Integrate with Existing Systems Easily
Like most retailers, companies likely have multiple systems in place, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to manage manufacturing operations. Design teams may also use a 3D solution or a PIM system or need to connect to an e-commerce site. Centric Software’s experts bring extensive experience integrating Centric solutions seamlessly with existing and new systems. Centric’s solutions were built hand-in-hand with leading retailers and system integrators around the world to ensure success.
For retailers with legacy PLM systems that need replacing, Centric offers proven expertise, having replaced hundreds of outdated PLM solutions around the world.
Streamline retail product development with Centric PLM
Request a Demo Today!