November 6th, 2023

Hultafors Group builds Global Digital Platform with Centric PLM

Global manufacturing group partners with Centric Software to enable growth and monitor sustainability data progress

CAMPBELL, Calif., November 7, 2023 – Centric Software®, the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) market leader, proudly announces its partnership with PPE global leader, Hultafors Group, and its largest brand, Snickers Workwear. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, price and sell products such as apparel, footwear, sporting goods, furniture, home décor, consumer electronics, cosmetics, food & beverage, and luxury to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Hultafors Group is a company group of 17 international premium brands in the PPE and Hardware sectors. Hultafors, the Group’s heritage brand, was founded in 1883 and is a proud family name. Its unwavering commitment to quality and sustainability have garnered it international prestige and now Hultafors Group sells through dealers across 16 core markets within Europe and North America.

With aspirations to triple sales between 2023 and 2030 and achieve ambitious sustainability goals, Hultafors Group has launched a global, company-wide digitalization program to better enable them to measure, follow and report on sustainability progress. The aim is to establish an IT foundation to capitalize on the opportunities of digital technology, improve the way they do business and create new solutions for their customers and users.

“We have the responsibility to create a new roadmap for the future and the challenge is to create this new scalable platform,” says Martin Edling, CIO at Hultafors Group. “Data is the new gold, and we need to start leveraging it. One of the first projects out of the gates is the PLM solution and it is the first milestone for us.”

Snickers Workwear, the Group’s largest brand, sees great value in updating their digital platforms and will be the first to implement Centric PLM™.

“Lacking a single source of data adds a layer of complexity,” says Jenny Falk, Product Development Manager at Snickers Workwear. My hope is with Centric PLM, we will be able to streamline every aspect of product development and have full transparency.”

Hultafors Group selected Centric PLM for its scalability, exceptional user experience and interface, out of the box functionality and cost efficiency. Centric’s PPE industry knowledge, impressive customer references and integrations to various sustainability platforms secured the partnership.

“It was important to have a partner who specialized in the textiles industry and Centric’s expertise uniquely straddles both hard goods and fashion,” says Edling. “We were reassured by Centric’s volume of case studies and Sweden-based customer references.”

Snickers Workwear will use Centric PLM across the business to track every step of the product journey from ideation to close. They expect PLM’s single source of truth for all data, including the results of material and chemical analysis, to help them track the complex third-party regulatory requirements for safety gear. Snickers Workwear will also leverage Centric’s platform integrations to pursue sustainable packaging goals, improve assortment analysis and line management processes with the Textile Library, and launch the Supplier Portal.

Over the coming years, the long-term aim is to deploy Centric PLM across the entire Group, in an enterprising move to unify the unique expertise of each brand into a collective online space. “We are excited for the future launch of Centric PLM with Snickers Workwear and are in the process of educating our other brands about PLM,” says Edling. “We expect PLM and other solutions in our overall digitalization roadmap to help us maintain our rapid trajectory of growth and aggregate data on multiple levels, while we maintain the individual selling points of every brand.”

“We are thrilled that the Hultafors Group and Snickers Workwear have selected Centric PLM as the first step of their global digitalization project,” says Chris Groves, CEO of Centric Software. “We are excited to be a digital transformation partner for their ambitious growth and sustainability journey.”

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Hultafors Group (www.hultaforsgroup.com)

Hultafors Group offer a unique portfolio of premium equipment, that improves functionality, productivity, and safety in all aspects of professional user’s workday.

Hultafors Group is one of Europe’s largest companies to supply workwear, footwear, head protection, hand tools, ladders, and work lights for professional users.

The products are developed, manufactured, and marketed as their own brands, which are available through leading distributors in nearly 70 countries worldwide, with emphasis on Europe and North America.

Hultafors Group is a trusted partner that enables synergies and sustainable growth for both people and business. From business development and logistics to product design and marketing, we form a powerful partner that propels our brands and people forward.

Snickers Workwear (www.snickersworkwear.com)

Snickers Workwear offers innovative, technical workwear with uncompromising safety that work together with today’s craftsmen and women wanting the most durable and style-conscious solutions available. We lead the industry in style and design by emphasizing safety, functionality, longevity, and comfort – inspiring demanding professionals to a smarter and safer work life.

Centric Software® (www.centricsoftware.com)

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric Software provides an innovative and AI-enabled product concept-to-replenishment platform for retailers, brands and manufacturers of all sizes. As experts in consumer goods like fashion, outdoor, luxury, home, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics, Centric Software delivers best-of-breed solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products.

· Centric PLM™, the leading PLM solution for consumer goods, optimizes product execution from ideation to development, sourcing and manufacture, realizing up to 50% improvement in productivity.

· Centric Planning™ is an innovative, cloud-native, AI solution delivering end-to-end planning capabilities to maximize retail and wholesale business performance resulting in a 110% increase in margin.

· Centric Pricing & Inventory™ leverages AI to drive margins and boost revenues by up to 18% via price and inventory optimization from pre-season to in-season to season completion.

· Centric Market Intelligence™ is an AI-driven platform giving insights into consumer trends, competitor offers and pricing to boost competitivity and get closer to the consumer, with a proven 12% increase in average initial price point.

· Centric Visual Boards™ pivot actionable data in a visual-first orientation to ensure robust, consumer-right assortments and product offers, increasing product portfolios by up to 90% using the same resources.

Centric Software’s market-driven solutions have the highest user adoption rate, customer satisfaction rate and fastest time to value in the industry. Centric Software has received multiple industry awards and recognition appears regularly in world-leading analyst reports and research.