CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
7 March 2006
Product News
Centric Software Introduces Collection Management Solution
Centric Software announced a new solution for apparel and consumer goods manufacturers. Centric's Collection Management solution enables manufacturers to reduce new product development cycle time and deliver on tight deadlines by providing real-time visibility into key technical, product and scheduling information as well as financial data.
Separately today, Centric announced that Artsana, a global supplier of children's apparel, toys and family care products, based in Como, Italy, has successfully completed a pilot program utilizing this solution. Due to the success of the pilot, Artsana plans to deploy this and other Centric Software solutions across all worldwide operations and brands.
"As the successful Artsana pilot demonstrates, Centric has developed a very compelling solution that addresses the most urgent needs of apparel and consumer goods manufacturers," said Chris Groves, chief executive officer at Centric Software. "Centric's Collection Management solution derives intelligence from existing, scattered repositories of data, delivering additional, real value from existing repositories of information while accelerating business processes."
Centric's Collection Management solution intelligently captures and presents through user-defined dashboards the key performance indicators on the development and launch of the many thousands of items in a season, product line or collection. By automatically gathering and maintaining live links to data from multiple systems such as design, material management, forecasting and sales systems, Centric's Collection Management solution rolls-up information from individual products to product families to entire company collections, providing complete visibility into design, planning, sourcing, development and sales schedules and activities.
This automated multi-level visibility into the status of every task enables apparel and consumer goods manufacturers to rapidly make informed decisions on individual items, execute against targets and assess overall success of each item against plan. The automation of data collection reduces cycle times and provides the product intelligence needed to select new products that will promote brand loyalty and maximize revenue.
Collect information from multiple, disparate source systems
Centric's Collection Management solution gathers and combines critical product and business data from source systems, to provide executives and product teams with multi-level visibility into collection status. The solution provides:
• Information roll-up to multiple levels with visibility based on role
• Drill down to root causes for problem solving
Make decisions on potential issues as they arise
Centric's Collection Management solution provides immediate identification and actionable intelligence on potential issues that could cause delays, enabling manufacturers to manage growing product volumes and tight deadlines. The solution provides:
• Insight into which products are on target and which are at risk
• Different views of key performance indicators for different teams
Execute with improved communications and coordination between distributed teams
Centric's Collection Management solution eases the communication challenges that arise with large distributed, cross-functional teams by providing:
• Collection item creation for seasons, down to styles, with technical information
• Drill down functionally to find details, including comments, notes and dates
• associated with each item and activity
• Secure, role-based access to all collection metrics
• Detailed schedules for each collection item with associated task descriptions and their planned start dates, end dates and real/actual dates
Assess collection performance
Executives see live, critical information presented in combinations and formats that generate the greatest meaning to make informed decisions. Centric's Collection Management solution provides:
• Collection performance monitoring that presents the key information necessary to kill products early and promote with confidence those products and product lines most likely to provide the highest value
• Rolled-up metrics that are calculated at each level to automatically measure status and completion
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