Although Ackermans sells in Southern Africa, its buying, merchandising, and sourcing operations are global. These had become impossible to manage in an informal, Excel-based environment, and slow communication and limited collaboration were creating delays and affecting financial outcomes.
Ackermans turned to Centric PLM™ to centralize this critical information and to standardize and streamline buying and other processes – providing instant intelligence and allowing core teams to focus on productivity rather than administration. Ackermans selected Centric for its configurability and ability to adapt to the fast-changing apparel industry.
For Ackermans, the most significant result of this digital transformation is immediate access to business-critical information and insights that might once have taken days or weeks to analyze. With the ability to communicate with suppliers on a style-by-style basis, the time it takes the Ackermans buying team to produce tenders has been cut from two days to two hours. Bottlenecks have been eliminated, reducing stress for the PLM user community of internal teams and suppliers.
