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Centric Software Expands its Concept-to-Launch Platform
Centric Software is actively working to expand its concept-to-launch product lifecycle management (PLM) platform for retailers and manufacturers. Combining software innovation with some sound acquisitions, the vendor appears to be designing a comprehensive platform that can fulfill companies' PLM needs from end to end. Read this article from TEC analyst Predrag (PJ) Jakovljevic to learn more about Centric's new offerings and their varied applications.
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Headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in major cities around the world, and majority-owned by Dassault Systèmes, Centric Software offers a product concept-to-launch (plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell, and replenish) platform for consumer goods retailers, brands, and manufacturers of fashion, footwear, luxury items, outdoor and sporting goods, furniture, home décor, consumer electronics, cosmetics and personal care, and food and beverage products. While the company was founded in 2003, Centric has seen a surge in growth of over 2,600% in the last 12 years.
The company employs nearly 1,000 staff and has over 800 customers, with more than 120 of these clients gained in 2023. Most of these new customers use the vendor’s flagship Centric PLM suite, a market-leading platform with an intuitive, “single version of the truth” approach to retail product lifecycle management (PLM). Centric PLM users can orchestrate their competitive retail and product strategies to maximize revenues, reduce costs, increase agility and time to market/new product development (NPD), and get closer to consumers. A more recent offering is Centric Visual Boards, organically developed visual digital boards for tablets, smartphones, and large-scale TV sets for enhanced concept, assortment, showroom, sourcing, and collaboration. These boards facilitate improved/expanded product portfolios and reduce product assortments’ presentation time in open-to-buy cycles by up to 40%. This leads to better targeted global and regional offer development and tighter assortments better corresponding to consumers’ buying behavior.
For its part, Centric Planning – based on the late-2021 acquisition of Armonica – is an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven solution optimizing financial forecasting, merchandising, and in-season planning for improved operating margins, expedited planning cycles, and reduced inventory.
Companies are globalizing their product portfolios with more brands, more channels, more categories, and more products that are more swiftly introduced to market. Margin of error is also low in today’s marketplace, with businesses contending with profitability pressure on each stock-keeping unit (SKU), as well as sustainability, traceability, and compliance requirements. Comparing prices is now standard with a still stubborn inflation, as is paying more for only the most compelling products.
As a result, retailers and brands are faced with a new reality: not only do they need to carefully weigh options prior to bringing products to market, but they also need to fully understand the competitive landscape throughout the product lifecycle, from ideation to replenishment. They must thus plan, develop, source, cost, and price proactively, and in accordance with market trends while considering competitors’ assortments.
To that end, Centric Software acquired StyleSage in late 2022 for its AI-powered tools in competitive assortment benchmarking and price and product trend insights. StyleSage provides product trend data and competitive pricing intelligence to enable fashion, beauty, and home retailers and brands to understand the pricing and style trends shaping their market and visualize the product-pricing mix of their competitors. The post-acquisition solution has since been named Centric Market Intelligence (see figure 1).
Figure 1. Centric Market Intelligence
During a pre-season period, the solution provides competitive benchmarking to strategically design and price assortments, knowing how competitive pricing strategies and discounting programs work. In season, however, the focus shifts to real-time market response in adjusting pricing based on consumer behavior and competitors’ execution. By being able to increase the selling price and identifying gaps in their assortments, retailers can also improve product margins, all while offering more competitive products corresponding to consumers’ wishes.
As changing consumer demand, economic, and market conditions force the industry to adapt, retailers globally are turning to AI and predictive pricing to optimize their pricing strategies, maximize margins, increase revenues (and gross margins), and improve competitiveness. This way, they can also reduce discounting/markdowns (or improve the rate of sell-through at full price) and working capital.
Retailers are unable to respond effectively to today’s big, data-driven world by relying on pesky spreadsheets and pedestrian manual methods to optimize initial price, promotions, and markdowns. This is especially true when working across multiple channels and countries for thousands of SKUs.
Focusing on the needs of providers of trend-driven, highly seasonal goods such as fashion, apparel, and footwear, aifora’s configurable software as a service (SaaS) platform offers predictive analytics algorithms and machine learning (ML) models to interactively optimize pricing across various stages of the retail lifecycle (see figure 2). Recently renamed Centric Pricing & Inventory, the solution also enhances inventory allocation and replenishment, enabling businesses to optimize supply chains and reduce overstock or stockouts to align with sustainability initiatives.
Figure 2. Centric Pricing & Inventory
The retail automation platform enables retailers to predict how much their customers will buy, when, where, and at what price. With a variety of AI-based solutions for pricing and inventory management, users can comprehensively optimize their merchandise management and automate all underlying processes. The solution can be optionally enhanced via integration with PredictHQ for event data intelligence and Meteonomiqs for weather- and geo-based data science services. Centric Pricing & Inventory customers have reported up to an 18% increase in sales and 15% in gross margins.
Centric’s PLM competitors like PTC, Bamboo Rose, Lectra-Gerber, Aptean TXT, TradeBeyond, and others do not cover all those bases. If a retailer needs assortment planning and allocation capabilities, they will need to look at the likes of Oracle, Aptos, Blue Yonder, Relex, etc. For pricing and inventory management, they may seek out O9, Revionics, Zebra Antuit.ai, and Nextail, while for retail market intelligence, retailers can enlist the likes of Omnilytics, EDITED, Retviews, Trendalytics, and others. Therefore, Centric has many avenues and opportunities to pursue in covering all those needs with a single platform.
The company employs nearly 1,000 staff and has over 800 customers, with more than 120 of these clients gained in 2023. Most of these new customers use the vendor’s flagship Centric PLM suite, a market-leading platform with an intuitive, “single version of the truth” approach to retail product lifecycle management (PLM). Centric PLM users can orchestrate their competitive retail and product strategies to maximize revenues, reduce costs, increase agility and time to market/new product development (NPD), and get closer to consumers. A more recent offering is Centric Visual Boards, organically developed visual digital boards for tablets, smartphones, and large-scale TV sets for enhanced concept, assortment, showroom, sourcing, and collaboration. These boards facilitate improved/expanded product portfolios and reduce product assortments’ presentation time in open-to-buy cycles by up to 40%. This leads to better targeted global and regional offer development and tighter assortments better corresponding to consumers’ buying behavior.
For its part, Centric Planning – based on the late-2021 acquisition of Armonica – is an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven solution optimizing financial forecasting, merchandising, and in-season planning for improved operating margins, expedited planning cycles, and reduced inventory.
Centric Market Intelligence
The retail and consumer goods landscape has never been more multifaceted and volatile than it is now. The economic disruption and supply chain crunch spawned by the pandemic and ongoing political strife have led consumers to be prudent, discerning, and sensitive to pricing.Companies are globalizing their product portfolios with more brands, more channels, more categories, and more products that are more swiftly introduced to market. Margin of error is also low in today’s marketplace, with businesses contending with profitability pressure on each stock-keeping unit (SKU), as well as sustainability, traceability, and compliance requirements. Comparing prices is now standard with a still stubborn inflation, as is paying more for only the most compelling products.
As a result, retailers and brands are faced with a new reality: not only do they need to carefully weigh options prior to bringing products to market, but they also need to fully understand the competitive landscape throughout the product lifecycle, from ideation to replenishment. They must thus plan, develop, source, cost, and price proactively, and in accordance with market trends while considering competitors’ assortments.
To that end, Centric Software acquired StyleSage in late 2022 for its AI-powered tools in competitive assortment benchmarking and price and product trend insights. StyleSage provides product trend data and competitive pricing intelligence to enable fashion, beauty, and home retailers and brands to understand the pricing and style trends shaping their market and visualize the product-pricing mix of their competitors. The post-acquisition solution has since been named Centric Market Intelligence (see figure 1).
Figure 1. Centric Market Intelligence
During a pre-season period, the solution provides competitive benchmarking to strategically design and price assortments, knowing how competitive pricing strategies and discounting programs work. In season, however, the focus shifts to real-time market response in adjusting pricing based on consumer behavior and competitors’ execution. By being able to increase the selling price and identifying gaps in their assortments, retailers can also improve product margins, all while offering more competitive products corresponding to consumers’ wishes.
Enter Centric Pricing & Inventory
More recently, Centric brought price and inventory optimization solution aifora into the fold in late 2023. Founded in Düsseldorf, Germany in 2017, aifora is an AI-driven, predictive pricing retail automation platform that enables brands and retailers to achieve continuous growth and profitability improvement through data-driven lifecycle pricing, inventory management and allocation, replenishment, and re-ordering practices.As changing consumer demand, economic, and market conditions force the industry to adapt, retailers globally are turning to AI and predictive pricing to optimize their pricing strategies, maximize margins, increase revenues (and gross margins), and improve competitiveness. This way, they can also reduce discounting/markdowns (or improve the rate of sell-through at full price) and working capital.
Retailers are unable to respond effectively to today’s big, data-driven world by relying on pesky spreadsheets and pedestrian manual methods to optimize initial price, promotions, and markdowns. This is especially true when working across multiple channels and countries for thousands of SKUs.
Focusing on the needs of providers of trend-driven, highly seasonal goods such as fashion, apparel, and footwear, aifora’s configurable software as a service (SaaS) platform offers predictive analytics algorithms and machine learning (ML) models to interactively optimize pricing across various stages of the retail lifecycle (see figure 2). Recently renamed Centric Pricing & Inventory, the solution also enhances inventory allocation and replenishment, enabling businesses to optimize supply chains and reduce overstock or stockouts to align with sustainability initiatives.
Figure 2. Centric Pricing & Inventory
The retail automation platform enables retailers to predict how much their customers will buy, when, where, and at what price. With a variety of AI-based solutions for pricing and inventory management, users can comprehensively optimize their merchandise management and automate all underlying processes. The solution can be optionally enhanced via integration with PredictHQ for event data intelligence and Meteonomiqs for weather- and geo-based data science services. Centric Pricing & Inventory customers have reported up to an 18% increase in sales and 15% in gross margins.
PLM, Planning, and Pricing on One Platform
Centric appears to be building a most comprehensive concept-to-launch retail platform, well beyond the core PLM scope. Until now, we have yet to see a broad solution providing the intelligence needed to drive pricing- and style-related decisions and move products from concept/inspiration to execution and launch – all while optimizing factors impacting consumer experience, such as product assortments’ availability, time to market, and quality.Centric’s PLM competitors like PTC, Bamboo Rose, Lectra-Gerber, Aptean TXT, TradeBeyond, and others do not cover all those bases. If a retailer needs assortment planning and allocation capabilities, they will need to look at the likes of Oracle, Aptos, Blue Yonder, Relex, etc. For pricing and inventory management, they may seek out O9, Revionics, Zebra Antuit.ai, and Nextail, while for retail market intelligence, retailers can enlist the likes of Omnilytics, EDITED, Retviews, Trendalytics, and others. Therefore, Centric has many avenues and opportunities to pursue in covering all those needs with a single platform.
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About the Author
Predrag Jakovljevic | Principal Analyst
Predrag (PJ) Jakovljevic focuses on the enterprise applications market. He has over 20 years of industrial experience within the discrete manufacturing sector, including the machinery and equipment, automotive, construction and engineering, and electronics ...