Centric PLM
By Brian Kim, SMB Sales Director, Centric Software
Getting on-trend home décor, furnishings and accessories to market on time isn’t easy when you’re busy searching through heaps of emails and spreadsheets for missing product details, clearing up messes caused by version control errors and staying on top of product development chores.
Centric Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) provides a single source of the truth for all product-related data from concept to retail, enabling you to sweep away the data clutter and transform the way you plan, design, develop, manufacture and retail products.
Here are 3 key ways Centric PLM helps home décor businesses get great products into the hands of customers, fast.
1. Boost product introduction to keep up with home décor trends
Home fashion changes just as quickly as the apparel fashion industry, and home décor businesses must innovate constantly to keep up with customer expectations. To maintain market responsiveness, businesses need a rapid product development and launch process.
With the whole lifecycle of a product managed in Centric PLM, communication and collaboration is faster. There’s no more searching for that detail you need from a supplier – it’s all in the system and updated in real time. Errors are reduced, time spent on data entry is cut dramatically, and teams have a clear view of the next step needed to progress a product through its lifecycle.
Chinese home textiles business Your Moon cites Centric PLM as a key factor in boosting R&D efficiency. In the past, R&D teams were under enormous pressure in the days leading up to deadlines, working overtime to process data. With Centric PLM in place, Your Moon can manage product timelines more effectively and significantly improve efficiency to get products from R&D to the next stage faster.
2. Streamline product development to widen your offer
Home décor businesses often handle a wide range of products, from soft furnishings to kitchen, bedroom and bathroom accessories to DIY solutions and more. Centric PLM was created specifically for the fashion, apparel and consumer goods markets so has the flexibility to handle design and development details for a wide range of products, making it easy to set up and manage new product lines.
As businesses grow and increase product offerings, the need for a centralized system to handle product-related data grows in parallel. Centric PLM holds all present and historic product data as well as materials libraries, allowing creative teams to quickly begin creating new items using product information from previous seasons.
South African retailer Woolworths’ requirements for an innovative and intuitive PLM system grew alongside their business, with increased product offerings and expansion into new trading regions. Woolworths implemented Centric PLM for its Home business, and now benefits from easier management of collections, a reduction in time to market and improved visibility, making it easier to expand into new product offerings and markets.
Uniek, the US-based home décor brand, needed to increase its Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) count without increasing its headcount, and implemented Centric PLM to streamline the process of adding new products. Uniek has increased product variety by over 50%, with a SKU count skyrocketing from about 1,200 to 3,000. The time it takes to set up a new product has been reduced from a week to two days.
3. Improve collaboration to support growth
As home décor businesses expand, communication and sourcing arrangements can quickly become very complicated, with internal teams and suppliers in different countries and time zones. Centric PLM’s ‘single source of the truth’ approach makes sure that everyone connected to the system, including external suppliers, is on the same page and can collaborate seamlessly.
To handle steady growth, Ernsting’s family, the German supplier of home, apparel and living ranges, needed to optimize their internal and external processes. Today, Ernsting’s family uses Centric PLM to improve communication and collaboration between their large and tight-knit purchasing team and suppliers around the world in order to support growth. Centric PLM has made the collection development process more transparent and efficient, with cross-departmental collaboration helping Ernsting’s family to focus more intensively on creating new collections.
As for French wallpaper and home decoration specialists, 4murs, facing the future is made easier as buying teams and product managers can make faster decisions using Centric PLM. 4murs also benefit from Centric’s Collection Planning tool which ensures all products are marketed at the right time which was previously very hard to do as products have different development cycles.
Uniquely suited to the varied demands and pressures of home décor, Centric PLM has been selected by businesses producing everything from gifts to photo frames to bedding, including Arden Companies, Four Hands, Mud Pie, Uniek, Woolworths, Ernsting’s family, Cofel and Your Moon.
Want to find out more about how Centric PLM can transform your home décor business?
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