Reconnecting with Centric Software® on Retail Product Design and Sourcing Trends

We recently sat down with an executive from Centric Software to discuss the trends and latest developments in the retail product development, sourcing, and merchandize planning market. From its headquarters in Silicon Valley and 23 offices in trend-setting capitals around the world, Centric Software provides a Digital Transformation Platform for the most prestigious names in fashion, retail, footwear, luxury, outdoor, home décor, and consumer goods (see Figure 1).
 
The vendor has over 450 employees worldwide and is trusted by over 360 fashion, retail, and consumers goods manufacturing companies making attractive products for over 1200 brands. As of mid-2018,Centric has been majority owned by Dassault Systèmes, a Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Product Lifestyle Management (PLM) software leader.
 


Figure 1. Major Centric Software customer references
 

The Centric 8 PLM Platform

Centric’s flagship PLM platform, Centric 8, delivers enterprise-class merchandise planning, product development, sourcing, quality, and collection management functionality tailored for fast-moving consumer industries. The latest innovations from Centric include Centric 8 PLM v7.0, which incorporates a variety of innovative features designed to bring brands, retailers, and manufacturers closer to consumers by accelerating time to market and increasing agility.
 
Centric pioneered a fully digital design and development workflow with integration to multiple leading fashion 3D CAD software solutions (while being 3D-agnostic). The Centric Visual Innovation Platform (VIP), with the goal of driving digital collaboration to new heights, offers a new fully visual and digital experience for collaboration and decision-making. It includes the Centric Buying Board to transform internal buying sessions and maximize retail value, along with the Centric Concept Board for driving creativity and evolving product concepts (see Figure 2).
 


Figure 2. The Centric Sourcing Module
 
Ron Watson joined Centric Software in August 1998. Now VP of Products, Watson leads product strategy and execution for the Centric 8 suite of PLM software solutions for fashion and fast-moving consumer goods. He brings twenty years of experience focused on developing and delivering “voice-of-the-customer” solutions. Before joining Centric Software, Watson was principal partner in a private company that specialized in the application of workflow solutions to drive business process efficiency.
 
From 1994 to 1996, Watson ran the Rapid Application Development (RAD) team for Computervision’s product data management (PDM) group. In addition, he has held various senior level positions at Texas Instruments semiconductor and GIS divisions, and at Prime Computer, Inc., where he gained global experience leading their International New Product Introduction Services group. Watson earned a BSc (Honors) degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southampton, UK.
 
 

Retail Sourcing: An Interview on the Current State of Affairs

TEC: How has sourcing as a practice changed in the past few years in retail?
 
RW: Over the last few years, our customers have increasingly started to employ a multiple supplier strategy for many reasons. Dispersing sourcing through multiple channels enables brands and retailers to be closer to their supplier to improve lead times and drop shipments/replenishment and leverage trade agreements—especially where materials are concerned. In addition, they can focus on different customer segments by region (differences in color/size splits) and reduce risk by spreading out production amongst many suppliers to more easily handle quantities and drive down costs. Using local suppliers also reduces their environmental footprint, lowers costs of shipping from more distant locations, and shrinks the timeline for receiving samples and finished products.
 
Brand and supplier relationships are also evolving, with the supplier often requested to co-create/co-design products, which means getting more involved in the product development cycle. This means brands and suppliers require a more streamlined way to share information, communicate, collaborate, and track product data and changes as products move through the development process.
 
Hence, at Centric Software, all our innovative PLM software solutions are market-driven and developed with feedback from our customer partners and our Customer Advisory Board. We release two major releases and two minor releases a year. And, we hear from our customers more and more that they are looking for solutions to further streamline and improve the efficiency and visibly of their sourcing practices as part of their overall digital transformation strategies.
 
Digital transformation ultimately allows brands and retailers to rapidly respond to an evolving marketplace enabling faster product innovation, closing gaps between product inception and time to market while reducing costs. Our most recent release, Centric 8 PLM v.7.0, empowers sourcing teams within our fashion, retail, and consumer goods customers to streamline multiple supplier sourcing and supplier requests in order to get products to market faster.
   
TEC: Do you believe that sourcing has lately become an important strategic function at the fore of the business, rather than being seen as just a necessary evil?
 
RW: For fashion, retail, and consumer goods brands, getting the most innovative products to market faster, through more channels, and expanding to more regions are the foundations of their growth strategies to stay competitive. The competition is as fierce as it has always been, but there is extra pressure with online global giants like Amazon and Alibaba and other digital disruptors gaining market share in all product categories.
 
So, for our customers, there is increasing profit margin pressure on every stock keeping unit (SKU). Profit margins simply cannot be optimized without a focused sourcing and procurement strategy and time to market cannot be streamlined with no visibility into product development. Increasingly, our retail customers are creating their own private label/white label products to fill gaps in their product offerings, which allows them to create products with a higher profit margin. These own-label product lines are often co-created/designed with suppliers.
 
Sourcing is becoming more and more strategic for another very important reason: many brands and retailers are trying to be kinder to the planet. They are actively developing policies around sustainability, eco-friendly/ethical trade, full traceability, etc. Of course, they need astute PLM solution to be able to execute these strategies effectively and at scale.
 
Speaking of scale, another trend we are seeing is that individuals are being asked to manage more and more design proposals, requests for proposals (RFPs) and SKUs; one person needs to be able to handle thousands of supplier design proposals. We built functionality around this to allow centralizing supplier responses in one place—thus eliminating tedious manual data entry of product information and reducing time-consuming errors. Our customers need it.  

Emerging Technology Considerations

TEC: What sort of benefits do you observe as a result of moving procurement/sourcing/PLM operations to the cloud?
 
RW: Moving sourcing within PLM to a cloud-based software solution makes sure that any size of business (whether startups, medium-sized companies, or established enterprises with thousands of users and suppliers) can take advantage of the benefits of digital transformation. With a cloud-based PLM software solution, our customers don’t need to worry about the operational side of their PLM system and can start reaping real ROI benefits of faster, thanks to  more efficient product development, improved costs, increased market responsiveness, improved collaboration, and communications right away.
 
A cloud-based PLM solution means our customers can better manage their IT costs with low up-front costs, no hardware to buy and install, and no IT resources to hire, and lets them set the stage for broader collaboration with more users while using IT infrastructure designed for wide geographic reach. One important product development team benefit for a cloud-hosted Centric PLM system vs. an on-premise system is that the system is upgraded to our latest release regularly. Product teams can leverage new and exciting product features before the on-premise users can do the same.
 
TEC: Cybersecurity is of course a top priority for any institution or company undergoing a digital transformation journey. To that end, what strategies and technologies does Centric recommend for fostering strong cybersecurity practices and mitigating risk?
 
RW: Centric Software has partnered with over 1,200 brands to support their digital transformation strategies. Our customers trust us to streamline their operations to grow their businesses. But of course the backbone of that trust is built on security features within our PLM solution. Centric software takes security very seriously. We have the following practices in place:
 

• Training of all employees regarding cybersecurity attacks
• Multi-Factor Authentication
• Firewalls, logs, VPN threat detection technology
• Continuous security audits for infrastructure and application
• Access control
• Policies around removable media, data destruction and retention, acceptable usage of internet and infrastructure, access control, and change management
• Constant monitoring of changing global security standards like GDPR and others to ensure personal data is being managed securely and appropriately

 
We will continue covering this in an upcoming blog post, where we will discuss some other technologies and tools that help enable digital transformation. We will end this in-depth discussion with Ron Watson’s predictions on what the future might bring to the world of procurement, sourcing, and related collaborative PLM software. Stay tuned for more!  

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