Zak Designs Leverages Centric PLM for Strategic Growth

Mealtime Ware Company Automates Processes to Drive Efficiency

CAMPBELL, Calif., June 27, 2024 – Centric Software® is pleased to announce that the hydration company Zak Designs has selected Centric PLM™ to drive efficiency into their business. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products such as fashion, outdoor, luxury, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Headquartered in Airway Heights, Washington and established in 1976, Zak Designs creates kitchen hydration and mealtime products featuring on trend designs and everyone’s favorite characters. Over the years, the company has grown into a $100+ million business. Zak Designs sells its products through various channels, including mass-market retailers, clubs and online platforms.

With organic growth and about 2000 active SKUs, came growing pains. Chief Marketing Officer, Susan Perkins describes the situation prior to Centric PLM. “The level of manual data entry and interfacing with multiple departments is time-consuming nonvalue add work.  Data entry mistakes along with multiple departments entering the same data, create data integrity issues.” This led to wasted time, rework and double and triple-checking parts of the process.

Says Perkins, “We could have continued to operate as we were, but we’re driving towards significant growth over the next five years. We needed to simplify our structure without adding a lot of headcount.”

As the executive sponsor of the PLM implementation project, Perkins remarks, “Obviously there was no reason for us to live in this complex universe. We put out the call for PLM proposals.” Zak Designs was thorough and systematic with their approach. To determine what the company needed, the team took a step back, and mapped out current processes in detail, plus identified all their pain points. The selection process was equally thorough, engaging the entire core team and a tech consultant. Five companies were invited to bid.

“Key stakeholders played an important role in the decision-making; it was an inclusive process,” says Perkins. “Ultimately, the team unanimously decided that Centric PLM was the one we wanted.”

Centric PLM will be used across different teams such as industrial design, engineering, product development, marketing, graphic studio teams and sourcing partners.

As an international company, Perkins notes, “The language capabilities, version control, importation of data and integration with other systems in our global network were all factors in choosing Centric PLM.”

Phase 1 of their Centric PLM project is already live. The creation of a new product that requires an original mold used to involve a total of 84 spreadsheets. Now that has all been eliminated along with some of the more tedious work. “Item set-up for us was very complicated with multiple steps, taking a team of two about 2-3 hours,” Perkins says. “With Centric in place, we simply have to push a button—that is immediate payback in time saved.”

Perkins mentions another benefit. “The ease with which we can find information is vastly improved. I can just pull a mold up, and see everything that’s been created for it to determine what I want to use. It saves days, and that’s a lot of time in our world.”

Perkins’ advice to other companies looking to implement a PLM solution, “First of all, absolutely do it! But make the effort to really work it through with your key stakeholders and the Centric team to make the right decisions for your business.”

President of Centric Software, Fabrice Canonge says, “It is always exciting to witness the transformation from manual systems to automated workflows. We are grateful that Zak Designs has placed their trust in us; I know that their needs will be met.”

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