What are the advantages of a PLM system for emerging retail and fashion brands?

It’s no secret that apparel, footwear, and accessory manufacturers face complex global retail markets that are competitive, dynamic, fast-paced, and rapidly shifting. The demand for smart, connected, personalized, and sustainable products is increasing exponentially with trends changing faster than ever before. Brands must not only adopt, create, and predict trends, but also produce merchandise on time while maintaining costs.

These high-turnover fashion trends have a trickle-down effect on the entire production chain, posing challenges due to increasing consumer demand. As a result, creating ‘continuity’ in the product lifecycle is critical in order to address continuous production. Simply adding more technology is not the solution.

Because of ineffective processes and disconnected ecosystems, brands, designers, vendors, and suppliers frequently work in silos; where the IT setup, data, and communications are fragmented, resulting in manual errors in product data. Furthermore, reliance on physical sampling – in high volume and frequency – adds time and cost pressures, as well as having a negative impact on the environment.

What if you could empower your entire stakeholder ecosystem by centralizing, digitizing, and automating the value chain from ideation to manufacturing? What if you could eliminate data loss while improving the quality of your products and processes at the same time? This is where PLM comes in, but what exactly does it do?