As designers only ramp up their collaboration with geographically dispersed teams, PLM technology is an invaluable tool in helping bridge the logistical and cultural disparities while greatly enhancing communication.

Atul Dhakappa, Geometric Limited

The mid-90s saw globalization change many traditional and non-traditional practices. Moving from centralized product development to geographically dispersed and distributed product development teams was one such change. The fashion industry was among the first to decentralize the product development process across geographically dispersed teams. Over the last decade it has become common to enter an apparel chain store and see tags of  "Made in Taiwan," Bangladesh or India, etc.

With the need for adapting to the fast-changing fashion trends worldwide, this approach attempts to harness the best-of-breed capabilities from across the globe. However, geographical and cultural disparities as well as lack of effective collaboration tools (more often than not) hamper the fashion house's ability to leverage full benefits of global manufacturing.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) facilitates the fashion design and development teams to optimize their product management in a global work environment of networked and fragmented, yet collaborative product development teams. In the fashion industry, optimized global collaboration is all about uniting, organizing and managing the ever-increasing and ever-evolving product development data, thus facilitating a fashion house to work more effectively with its internal and external customers and bring products to market faster.

PLM acts as a facilitator for global collaboration as it enables:

Increased level of partnership with independent designers and sourcing teams

Productive partnerships between different business units in a product lifecycle are crucial. With multiple sourcing locations, ensuring a consistent fit, color quality and patterns across multiple product lines can become extremely difficult. An approach to overcome the geographical and language barriers is what companies require to make sure that everyone working on a collection can meet the predefined standards. By using PLM solutions, companies can create a value chain where information and transactions are exchanged flawlessly. PLM goes a long way toward integrating planning, design, development, manufacturing, marketing, and retail activities in a cohesive process flow.

Role and hierarchy-based access to global teams

At any stage of the product lifecycle, all concerned team members (in-house or dispersed) in the supply chain are able to see, create and manage various style representations/assortments. The access can be restricted based on their role in the entire product life cycle and the hierarchy within their teams. Role and hierarchy based access to individuals across departments facilitates collaboration and increases accountability, thus minimizing the risk of error and misunderstanding.

Security of information and quality across extended teams

Global sourcing leaves many companies exposed to the inherent risks of doing business in unfamiliar places and dealing with challenging differences in culture, tax and legal systems, economic security and regulatory environments. Absence of proper monitoring systems and oversight can lead to the risk of losing control over quality, thereby damaging the reputation and brand name. Global sourcing is inevitable for cost efficiencies and speed to market but maintaining security standards is of paramount importance. PLM helps in managing security across the extended supply chain.

Point integrations from disparate applications to PLM

A fashion PLM solution builds on industry expertise and provides collaborative development across the extended enterprise to deliver complete collections on time. Most PLM applications can fully integrate with existing fashion design and CAD/CAM software applications to offer a seamless collaborative work environment. It can also synchronize with other enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM, SCM as well as third-party design applications, and other systems enabling users to stay native to their systems. With PLM, internal collaborators and remote partners can easily share objectives and synchronize activities for simultaneous product, material and color development and sourcing.
Centralized database is resolving versioning

PLM enables fashion companies to synchronize the entire development process in a single work environment for optimal efficiency and visibility of costs and status. Creation of a central database or repository is vital as it enables association of styles, colors, materials, and all relevant descriptive information related to a particular season.

Dynamic style and design boards provide the framework for a collaborative design environment whereby designers, brand or line managers, technical developers, pattern designers and manufacturing partners interact to simulate, specify and validate product ideas. Each participant works on the same current version of the product, and can iterate the product by adding his or her own pieces of information, such as style designs, technical specifications, fabrics, trims and accessories, and 2D patterns.

Reusability across seasons

Design departments in the apparel and footwear industry commence seasonal activities by creating themed storyboards that illustrate the trends that will influence the line and individual styles in forthcoming seasons.

Maintaining past history data and a set of referenceable libraries goes a long way toward speeding up the style design process. Implementation of PLM increases the re-usability of the designs created across seasons with variation as per the designers' specifications.

Globally, fashion houses have been working with geographically dispersed teams for a number of years now. However, this method of working is not without its share of pitfalls in the form of geographical and cultural disparities and lack of effective collaboration.

PLM provides strong added value to fashion houses by ensuring that there is role and hierarchy-based access to multi-location design and sourcing teams, availability of a single knowledge repository across the enterprise with a centralized database for resolving versioning and integrations with existing disparate applications -- all of this while maintaining stringent security standards. PLM helps leverage the benefits of global manufacturing, making seamless global functioning a reality.


Atul Dhakappa is head of fashion practice at Geometric Limited