Centric Software Affirms Fashion PLM Leadership with Latest Centric 8 Release

 
Centric Software provides a digital transformation platform for prestigious names in the fashion, retail, footwear, luxury, outdoor, and consumer goods industries. The product’s distributed and scalable architecture offers high system performance and meets the design and production needs of major brands worldwide. This post examines how Centric’s latest product release provides the capabilities needed by these industries in this age of digitalization.
 
Centric, headquartered in Silicon Valley, has 270 employees in offices in nearly 20 capital cities around the world. The company is involved in the design and production of 550 brands, impacting the sales of more than $420 billion (USD) worth of products per year.
 
Centric’s flagship fashion product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, Centric 8, delivers enterprise-class merchandise planning, product development, sourcing, business planning, quality, and collection management functionality tailored for fast-moving consumer industries (see figure 1).
 
The vendor had one of the first out-of-the-box–configured cloud fashion PLM software solutions, with an enterprise mobility applications suite. In fact, Centric’s Visual Innovation Platform (VIP) is a digital collection of boards for touch-based devices such as iPads, iPhones, and large-scale, touch-screen televisions.
 

Figure 1. Centric 8 PLM look-and-feel
 
Centric also has a configurable solution for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) called Centric SMB. Those preconfigured packages extend fashion PLM software capabilities to include appropriate technology and key industry best practices tailored for small businesses.  

Enter Centric 8 V6.2

Centric Software recently announced that Centric 8 PLM version 6.2 is now generally available. The release was driven by feedback from Centric’s Customer Advisory Board (CAB) and customer innovation partners.
 
Many new innovations have been added to Centric PLM’s core Product Specification module for high-volume design and development environments that require the simultaneous development of multiple styles and seasons in bills of materials (BOMs). These days, a fashion product developer typically works on more than 100 styles in a season and at least 2 seasons in parallel.
 
Aiming to make developers’ lives more efficient, the new “BOM Sections” tool provides a formal structure that makes it easy to define BOMs while facilitating standardization and eliminating mistakes. The “BOM Push” tool provides efficiency through a from Theme to Style push of changes (en masse or by section) and a from Style to Style push (en masse or by section).
 
These new tools allow users to isolate sections or components in a BOM and to push out controlled updates for fast and accurate BOM creation and changes. This eliminates tedious, non-value-added work, reducing stress and improving productivity.
 There are also new innovations designed to boost user productivity and improve user experience (UX). As an example, “Slicer” is a business intelligence (BI) tool that works with live data across Centric PLM. It allows users to pivot data from the system to be able to analyze and answer questions for the business. Users who are familiar with pivot tables and have experience pivoting data in Excel and other spreadsheet or BI applications will have a small learning curve to master Centric’s Slicer.
 
In the 6.2 release, Slicer shows faster analytics capabilities and deeper data tree analyses and color coding options to help users prioritize work, survey progress, and identify problem areas. It reduces clutter and cognitive load, and it provides a conditional cell highlighting to allow users to easily spot patterns and potential issues to deal with.
 
The Slicer BI tool works with live data and is a good spin against using third-party BI tools, such as Tableau, which typically refresh data once or twice a day. It sounds like Centric has created an embedded BI tool, maybe one like Power BI, but without needing a snapshot of the data to create the key performance indicators (KPIs). Running a massive query on live data in Power BI could require a lot of resources, especially if multiple users are running queries simultaneously. Centric’s architecture has specifically been designed to allow this Slicer functionality without impacting the core database performance.
 
The latest release has added more abilities to the system, thereby improving its performance. Users are now able to “Prune” old, approved revisions. They can provide pause time for Job iterations so that other Jobs can kick in. They can also “Season Freeze” the operations of some fashions—freeze a hierarchy of completed seasons and freeze styles in a frozen season with conditional queries. Freezing completed seasons benefits day-to-day data and update rollups and system performance.  

Final Inspection Module

Innovations in release 6.2 include the debut of the Final Inspection Module, which contains a new mobile app, to evaluate and track the quality of the final product prior to accepting a purchase order and delivering the product. This new module allows brands and retailers to link quality evaluation criteria to original product specifications, and thereby set acceptable quality limits (AQLs) and evaluation points for suppliers on a per-product basis. Companies can communicate evaluation criteria and results digitally via a web or mobile app, providing real-time transparency into both vendor performance and production output, prior to the goods leaving the manufacturing site and transferring ownership.
 
This approach improves the quality of finished goods, minimizing the risk of receiving defective or poor-quality products. This final quality gate identifies potential claims and quantities delivered. It is preferred that the final inspection be done at the factory, to identify quality issues before the goods leave the country as well as any claims prior to payment processing. But often local service companies, or even the supplying factory itself, perform the final inspection.
 
Today, the final inspection is mainly a paper-based offline process riddled with inefficiency, as it is barely a system-supported (digitized) process. The final check needs data from various sources (tech packs, purchase orders, shipment data, AQL tables, etc.) and is often performed in “offline areas” (with no internet connectivity). Typically, this results in flow of data from the IT system landscape (mostly in the form of printed PDF document), thereby leading to loss of data quality.
 
Moreover, the data quality cannot be evaluated and reported for a PDF. To maintain data quality, users should avoid PDF printing and keep relationships to the source data. Digitalization enables post-inspection analysis and facilitates the integration of service companies.
 
Users need mobile support for factory-based inspections, enabling them to work offline and replicate the data at a later stage. Available as a web, mobile, and desk app, Centric’s Final Inspection Module has both online and offline capabilities for slow to no internet connectivity, with automatic syncing once the user is back online to facilitate onsite factory visits and international travel.
 
Centric’s AQL process combines tech pack data with inspection templates to automatically prepare the inspection with the target values and reduce the time to run the inspection. The enterprise resource planning (ERP) system provides the purchase order and shipment data (e.g., product, size, color, quantity, supplier, etc.). The number of samples to retrieve (how many and where) are coming from the AQL tables, which are provided by new final inspection module.
 
On the other hand, Centric PLM provides the product specification data (e.g., size chart, BOM, construction, sketches, sample comments, etc.) and determines the values to measure against (what to test). The Quality Guideline data, which is the latest 6.2 release capability (i.e., an AQL sample plan, defect library, and inspection template), delineates the quality boundaries.
 

Figure 2. Final Inspection module
 
The key motivator in the ERP context is determining the accepted quantity for inbound bookings. On the other hand, key motivators in the PLM context are the supplier performance management and learning from the past to increase quality. There is no data breakpoint during the whole process, which results with analytics on supplier performance on a defect level. It is also now possible to identify root causes on material and product specification levels.
 
The product specification drives the inspection content, as target values are inherited from the PLM BOM and are displayed in the inspection BOM. Target values are inherited from the PLM Size chart, whereby measurement samples are tracked for inspection, and reporting is based on the deviation from the target (see figure 2).
 

What the Future Might Bring

The final inspection requires a lot more than quality evaluation criteria linked to the original product specification. Yes, the quality assurance (QA) inspector needs the product construction and specs, and Centric would have that data from PLM software, but there also needs to be material inspections, final audits, and packing accuracy. And all these factors must be based upon commercialization steps, purchase order, and production data, plus multiple sampling rules, statistical pull quantities, split and combined inspections, trending, tiering, and a whole slew of other activities and metrics.
 
It is thus likely that next product releases by Centric will address these capabilities. Centric is expanding beyond its traditional stronghold in merchandizing and product development into production quality auditing. It hopes to catch up to PTC, Bamboo Rose, NGC, Dassault Systèmes, Gerber, Lectra, and other competitors with the traditional strength in supply chain management (SCM).
 
Centric will also likely continue to develop its aforementioned VIP platform, thereby automating decision-making and execution to shorten products’ time-to-market and distance-to-trend. The company will continue to focus on the design canvas UX revamp within Centric 8 to align with the popular design tools uses, e.g., to enable fashion mood boards, etc. And Centric will likely expand its virtual showroom capabilities and supplier requests for soliciting candidate products online, and challenge its competitors. We should all stay tuned for more news by the bullish software vendor.  

Related Reading

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