Get More Bang for your Buck: How PLM Boosts Productivity Using your Existing Resources

Tim Rumer, Director of Product Lifecycle Management at Mizuno USA explains how Mizuno USA has increased capacity and SKU numbers, cut development timelines and successfully on boarded users with Centric PLM without adding any additional IT resources.

The current retail environment demands a constant flow of new products. As Mizuno USA produces sports apparel and equipment, we need to be able to react quickly to changing trends in the sporting goods marketplace and get new products to market, fast. To meet these demands, quicker product development cycles and more clarity in the supply chain are key. How is it possible to manage this without hiring extra personnel and spending a lot of time analyzing and tweaking your current way of working?

At Mizuno USA, we achieved this goal by investing in Centric’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution to improve visibility across the product development process and centralize product information.

We use Centric PLM across all of our divisions and 28 product categories. People can manage up to 75% more styles, development timelines have been cut and we have on boarded users without any extra IT admin or training. Here’s how.

We now manage more categories more effectively. Between Centric’s data management capabilities and its planning functionality, users can easily manage 50-75% more styles than they could previously. This efficiency means that we can add more styles without putting additional pressure on personnel or making new hires.

Centric also enables people to handle more categories. A person who was managing cleated footwear now also manages soccer footwear and ball gloves, which is our most SKU-intense category. Before, if we wanted to add a category, we needed to add a new person. Now we can manage more categories with the same amount of people AND they have more time in front of the consumer, which leads to better products. It’s a win, win, win.

Managing more categories and SKUs allows us to grow our overall offering without having to add headcount. In the diamond sports (baseball and softball) division, Mizuno USA has increased its SKU count by 10.2% since implementing Centric PLM, adding a greater selection of products to our existing range.

It’s interesting to note that it’s much easier to track that data with Centric in place. If you truly manage all of your products in Centric, you can pull the data you need in three seconds with the change of a view or export. People have had that lightbulb moment – if they work in the system consistently, the information output is there for them and for everybody else.