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Centric Retail Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) helps home improvement and DIY retailers to optimize product assortments and drive the expansion of private label products with a single overview of all categories in order to make faster decisions and successfully launch new lines.
Sophie Kolb, Market Leader and PLM Project Sponsor
The world’s 3rd largest home improvement retailer
Home improvement and DIY is becoming a more fast-paced industry, as companies try to keep up with changing home renovation trends, innovations in building technology, changing environmental requirements and shifts in tariffs and trading situations while remaining competitive and assembling the right product mix for customers ranging from casual weekend DIY-ers to large building contractors.
Increasingly, leading home improvement retailers turn to digital solutions to gain the visibility and efficiency they need to tackle these challenges head on. Centric Retail PLM can help businesses address challenges such as:
Developing and sourcing products that meet new environmental requirements impacting the building industry
Keeping up with the pace of home renovation trends, advances in building technology and innovating and sourcing new products
Increasing and streamlining private label development while balancing utility, quality, choice and price
Right-sizing product ranges with the optimal product mix while providing enough choice for DIY customers and contractors
Keeping up with seasonal product development and assortment planning
Remaining competitive with pureplay retailers and online retailers
Expansion to new digital selling channels and regions through mergers and acquisitions
Uncertainty with changing tariffs and trade terms between the US and China and the UK and the EU impacting sourcing and manufacturing
Here are the top 6 ways Centric Retail PLM hammers market and operational challenges so your home improvement and DIY business can get better products to more customers in more regions faster and at a lower cost.
Centric Retail PLM powers the growth of private label strategies with innovative assortment planning tools and a single source of the truth for product-related data that connects product designers and developers directly with merchandise planners and suppliers to replace complicated and error-prone systems of spreadsheets and emails, ultimately shortening product development timelines. Easily manage pricing, labeling and tagging of products destined for multiple markets in multiple currencies and languages and automatically calculate costs and product margins with fluctuating commodity prices.
Centric Retail PLM’s high level visibility of your entire product offering, seasonal merchandise plans and regional assortments makes it easier to identify gaps that can be filled with new private label products and optimize merchandise and assortment plans across all categories and regions.
Protect your brand’s reputation and dramatically cut down on time spent carrying out factory audits and product quality inspections with Centric Retail PLM’s groundbreaking quality control and auditing mobile apps, using inspection templates directly connected to PLM that are accessible by all team members in real time from anywhere in the world. Centric’s mobility enables you to increase the volume and frequency of inspections and accuracy and reliability of inspection data.
Coordinating buying and suppliers with hundreds of spreadsheets while developing, sourcing and managing thousands of SKUs for products as diverse as bathroom vanities, plumbing fixtures, tiles, paint, screws, fasteners and nails, hand tools and electronic tools is incredibly complicated and time-consuming, with information for different product development and buying teams often in disparate places and formats and not easily shareable. Centric Retail PLM centralizes supplier and materials information in one accessible digital location so you can launch and evaluate supplier requests en masse and easily collaborate with chosen suppliers to co-create private label products efficiently and accurately.
Connect Centric Retail PLM easily with other software solutions such as Product Information Management (PIM) systems to quickly populate your e-commerce site with rich product descriptions, images and specs from PLM to reduce time spent on data entry, improve the consistency of product data across the business and boost the efficiency of digital sell-through.
Manage materials, design and product development details, calendar timelines and just-in-time ordering for special made-to-order products in an up-to-date, centralized digital space where actionable data is accessible to everyone who needs it with Centric Retail PLM.
Ready to learn more about how Centric Retail PLM will take your business up a notch? Check out the learning tools below and request a demo!