In The Face of Market Disruption, Make PLM Your Most Reliable Partner

At a time of unprecedented disruption to supply chains, retail channels, workforces and production processes, a strong collaborative PLM platform is your lifeline to operational stability.

Whatever volume of styles and new designs you throw at it, your PLM solution should be able to cope and respond. Wherever you source, it should offer you real-time insights into your material suppliers and product manufacturers, so you can respond to market demands and evolving geo-economic shifts. Whatever variety of product types you offer, it should support your growth and diversification strategy and allow you to shift production – even to producing personal protective equipment – at a moment’s notice, with no customization. And wherever your teams are in the world – especially now, with many of them working from home and physical meetings being restricted – your PLM should be the collaborative engine at the center of your corporate culture and product development cycle.

But not every PLM platform is cut out for this type of rapidly changing world. If your PLM is approaching, or past, legacy status then it could be working against you rather than working for you – at a time when every brand, retailer, and manufacturer needs to rely on technology and a reliable, proven PLM platform and partner you can trust.

There are many legacy PLM implementations still out there. Some fell short on their business transformation goals and have become under-used after extensive customization. Some have now passed the cut-off point for maintenance and support and are considered legacy at best, and laden with security vulnerabilities at worse. Some will be creaking under the extra load and slowing down designers’ and tech developers’ workflows. Some were never rolled out into the supply chain, cutting a vital link in international collaboration with suppliers and production partners. Many were too heavily customized in an effort to adapt to new market or channel opportunities. This made it impossible to get back on a feasible upgrade path, preventing brands from leveraging new features and integrations.

Most legacy PLM system vendors will have not taken meaningful, or measurable steps towards new innovations like 3D product design or built-in artificial intelligence and machine learning that provide data-driven predictions and recommendations. Others simply don’t have the capabilities to leverage augmented reality and apply this to your product development processes. The slick sales pitch you received is long gone and reality hits home that the functionality and ability to scale and perform were never realized. Your vision for PLM has resulted in just a replacement for email and excel documents. If your legacy PLM fits any of this, you could be facing extra, unnecessary uncertainty – with in-house teams and suppliers disconnected at a time when digital and remote working is at its most essential, and with no way to turn the product development data you manage into insights and other data-driven tools to power better-informed decision-making.

As the most widely-used PLM platform in retail by far, PTC FlexPLM has been offering certainty, stability, and scalability to the world’s biggest brands for decades in footwear, apparel, sports and performance, home décor, fashion and multi-category retail. More than 211,000 people rely on FlexPLM every day to power their product lifecycles – from concept to first stitch to full supply chain management – across more than 1,000 iconic global brands. They trust PTC to manage huge volumes of concurrent users, anywhere in the world. And they trust PTC to ensure top performance and enterprise-grade uptime, all the time.

Today, the retail landscape is shifting on a daily basis, and retailers need to respond by identifying new gaps in the market and shifting their operations – relying on their PLM to support it. Brands and retailers throughout the world can rely on FlexPLM to support the shifting dynamics and rapidly changing flow of today’s economic landscape, as well those yet unknown in the future.

While other PLM software platforms often require costly customization projects to add support for new product categories and hierarchies, PTC FlexPLM has multi-category support as standard – with no limits, and no new consulting engagements to inhibit progress.

Legacy PLM implementations are often hosted on-site, adding a huge burden to retailers’ in-house IT teams, and forcing business leads to jump through hoops to extend or expand technology landscape. As a SaaS offering, FlexPLM runs in the cloud, giving customers a seamless way to on-board new categories, new brands, new processes, and new users (internal and external) without adding extra hardware. All users can work from anywhere – powering visibility, accountability, and collaborative working while the world is in lockdown - without impacting the critical projects in the focus of IT.

And because FlexPLM is part of the multi-billion-dollar PTC business, our support and innovation-driven R&D strategy are second to none. During the coronavirus outbreak, PTC has given all of its customers access to its remote collaboration tool Vuforia Chalk, and as a total technology partner we have real in-house expertise in AI, AR, IoT, digital product creation and much more – all adapted for the complex requirements and unique challenges of retail.

Both core FlexPLM and PTC’s new innovations are now more accessible than ever, thanks to low-cost, high-speed upgrades that are keeping more FlexPLM customers than ever on the cutting edge.

Additional change might not be top of mind in a difficult time like now, but if your PLM is making things worse or hampering your product development, this could be the ideal time to consider switching to a solution that will surely help your business not just survive, but thrive. Feature richness, stability, and scalability have already made FlexPLM the platform of choice (and PTC as the key technology partner) for more than 150 of the world’s best-established retailers. Join the ranks of the world’s elite in the brand and retail market by taking positive action today.