August 29th, 2025

arena Dives into AI-Powered Forecasting and Assortment Strategies with Centric Planning

“I like to say Centric Planning is like a third arm that will help me with my daily job. Instead of battling with Excel, now we have something that can power our process and make it faster and more accurate.”

— Ettore Biafora

Head of Merchandising and Supply Chain Projects at arena

Leading swimwear brand extends strategic partnership with Centric Software to deliver forecast accuracy for end-to-end supply chain impact

CAMPBELL, Calif., September 2, 2025 – Centric Software® is pleased to announce that arena has selected Centric Planning™ to drive forecasting precision and global merchandising agility. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products such as fashion, luxury, footwear, outdoor, home and related goods like cosmetics & personal care as well as multi-category retail to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

The move builds on arena’s 10-year relationship with Centric Software, which began with the adoption of Centric PLM™. The combination of PLM and planning will give arena greater cross-functional alignment, transparency across teams and visibility from product development to market execution.

“As we grow the business is becoming bigger and the variables more complex,” says Giorgio Farinelli, Chief Operations Officer at arena. “Centric Planning is the natural next step in our evolution to improve the company, the process and the analysis we needed to do.”

Prior to selecting Centric Planning, arena relied heavily on spreadsheets and static reporting tools to manage demand planning and assortment decisions. This limited visibility created operational bottlenecks during high stakes forecasting periods.

“We work with 1GB+ spreadsheets and inserting a formula can take up to five minutes,” says Alessandro Astuti, Head of Planning & Allocation. “It’s frustrating and impacts the team’s focus and motivation.”

arena’s team sees Centric Planning as essential to improving early forecast accuracy—a critical step for optimizing production timelines with suppliers across Europe, Africa and Asia.

“If we can gain even 10% better accuracy on the first forecast using Centric Planning, it would be a great success,” says Ettore Biafora, Head of Merchandising and Supply Chain Projects at arena. “The more accurate we are early on, the better it is for the collection development and the entire value chain. We can avoid development costs, delays in shipping and improve the quality of service we deliver to customers.”

Centric Planning will also accelerate arena’s strategic shift toward more localized and channel-specific collections. By replacing manual Excel-based analysis with an integrated system, the merchandising team will have faster access to insights needed to make timely decisions in fast-moving market conditions.

“We used to spend hours running spreadsheet analyses,” Biafora explains. “With Centric Planning, we expect to move from one hour to five minutes—and that makes a huge difference when deciding what collections go to market.”

“I like to say Centric Planning is like a third arm that will help me with my daily job,” says Biafora. “Instead of battling with Excel, now we have something that can power our process and make it faster and more accurate.”

“We’re thrilled that arena has chosen Centric Planning to transform its assortment management,” said Chris Groves, CEO of Centric Software. “By leveraging real-time analytics and seamless system integrations, arena will gain the clarity and agility needed to proactively make smarter, faster decisions.”

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arena sport (about.arenasport.com)

Since 1973 arena has revolutionized the world of water sports through intense collaboration with world-class athletes and the development of cutting-edge competition swimsuits. Today, this spirit of collaboration and innovation lives on through the continuous development of advanced materials and Italian design that improves the performance, style and expression of all those who choose arena. From racing in the swimming lanes to living in style, arena is dedicated to providing all swimmers with the tools they need to express themselves, feel confident, win and achieve more.

Centric Software® (centricsoftware.com)

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

Centric PLM™, the leading PLM solution for fashion, outdoor, footwear and private label, optimizes product execution from ideation to development, sourcing and manufacture, realizing up to 50% improvement in productivity and a 60% decrease in time to market.
Centric Planning™ is an innovative, cloud-native, AI solution delivering end-to-end planning capabilities to maximize retail and wholesale business performance, including SKU optimization, resulting in an up to 110% increase in margins.
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 delivering insights into consumer trends, competitor offers and pricing to boost competitivity and get closer to the consumer, with an up to 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, dramatically decreasing assortment development cycle time.
Centric PXM™, AI-powered product experience management (PXM) encompasses PIM, DAM, content syndication and digital shelf analytics (DSA) to optimize the product commercialization lifecycle resulting in a transformed brand experience. Increase sales channels, boost sell through and drive margins.

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, appearing regularly in world-leading analyst reports and research.