Lacoste Extends the Value of FlexPLM to Speed Design and Development Decisions

PTC is delighted to announce that Lacoste, one of the world’s most iconic brands with an excellent reputation for quality, elegance, and innovation, has successfully implemented its ThingWorx Internet of Things (IoT) technology.

As a long-time PTC customer and user of FlexPLM – PTC’s flagship retail product lifecycle management solution, Lacoste was looking for a quick and efficient way to connect and visualize its in-house product data that was spread across multiple upstream and downstream business systems, in order to provide its designers, developers, and other PLM users with actionable insights to drive better, faster and more insightful business decisions.

“The pace of change and the demands placed upon the retail and fashion industry has accelerated dramatically,” explains Cédric Boeuf, Business Analyst for Product and Design at Lacoste. “Therefore, to keep pace and remain competitive, its essential that our internal teams can access and analyze our business data quickly, and in real-time. Instead of manually combining data from multiple systems and using tools like Excel® to interpret and report on the data, our PLM users now have beautiful and highly visual dashboards, completely personalized with Lacoste branding, that provide them with the information they need to be able to make critical business decisions in a timely fashion.

"By leveraging ThingWorx and integrating it with our existing FlexPLM solution and other third party applications, we now have all relevant data in one place and we’ve been able to save our PLM users hundreds of hours by eliminating complex and unnecessary manual administrative and reporting processes, freeing them up to focus on what they do best, designing and developing products that meet the needs of our customers.”

Over the last several months, Lacoste has been using ThingWorx to create several role-based applications and dashboards that address a set of specific business requirements, including:

• Design Efficiency & Collection: Designers and product managers needed a fast and easy way to validate if new products and downstream systems have all imagery and sketches available in preparation for the collection build. In addition, designers and developers required a highly visual and transparent way to review the collection to determine which products should be moved out, added and carried forward.

• Margin Control: The Finance Department and Business Controller are now able to see detailed product performance data - which styles have sold well, which styles had low margins to analyze and better determine product margins moving forward.

• BOM Analyzer: The material team now has highly accurate materials aggregation, knowing exactly how much of a given material is needed for all colorway, size, factory, and channel variations. Lacoste can leverage this information for better buying power, further increasing margins.

• Costing Simulation: Built specifically for merchandisers who wanted the ability to analyze and simulate different cost scenarios to see if product designs will meet cost and margin targets early on during the design and development process, allowing them to make adjustments before it’s too late.

Taking an agile implementation approach, Lacoste is able to create ThingWorx mock-ups in just a few days. Julian Wattier, Lacoste’s Business Analyst for Product and Design explains: “In the retail industry, creating new reports or analytics often requires extensive development resources and in some cases can take months to complete. With PTC’s ThingWorx technology, we can build a new app or dashboard aligned with a particular business need and have our users test it and provide feedback within a matter of days. Once the users have approved it, we can go into production right away. This means our users are getting the data, insights, and actions that matter to them quickly and easily. We now have over 40 users of ThingWorx, in addition to 450 FlexPLM users.

"With ThingWorx, we’ve been able to extend the footprint of FlexPLM and the combination of the two solutions is very powerful for our business. We’re now able to source good quality data that doesn’t contain errors, that really helps to support better decision making.”

“Each day, designers, merchandizers, and product developers make important decisions usually requiring data that is scattered across siloed systems, preventing collaboration, leading to errors and increased costs, and overall requiring a lot of time and admin work to keep it together,” says Bill Brewster, Senior Vice President and General Manager of PTC’s Retail Business Unit.

“With ThingWorx, users are now able to quickly connect and visualize data across several business systems. Once all of the data is in one place and everyone is working from the same source of truth, insights can be gathered that can help to shape and speed decision making during product development. We are delighted that Lacoste sees the value in combining their existing FlexPLM solution with ThingWorx, and we look forward to our continued partnership.”

PTC’s ThingWorx apps and dashboards enable brands and retailers to seamlessly integrate data regardless of what system it comes from or what format it is in. They wrap and extend around existing technology solutions and eliminate time-consuming rip-and-replace IT implementations, providing quick time-to-value.