PI Apparel 2016 Program

The product innovation/development space has changed; for too long companies relied on historical trends, the 'this worked so let's repeat' model. But over time, customers with an ever-increasing number of choices, became unresponsive to this and drove the need for manufacturers to differentiate themselves more.

Simultaneously, market tools changed and we began to get better access to design tools and services that brought more feedback information forward and allowed for the earlier development of consumer-centric assortments.

This session will discuss how the innovation space has and continues to change, the tools that are now readily available to help you be more consumer-centric and how best to respond to the tightening of the gap between processes, 3D and visualization.

In 2013, DKNY chose to be proactive; having selected RLM as an ERP partner, they already had a strategy in place for a complete enterprise-wide system suite roadmap that tied into that deployment. At PI Apparel 2015 and with the roadmap on track, Cindy Payero ran a focus group on how IT needed to position themselves as a Business enabler to ensure the process was as smooth as possible: the Business voicing their requirements and IT aligning themselves with these needs early-on. 

Since then, the company has undergone a series of changes and today, is a very different enterprise but Cindy joins us to explore the vital role of IT and it's lending ear in making this transition productive and pain-free. More specifically:

• Working alongside new management to understand their broad vision and being transparent with what is and isn't possible
• Aiding new leadership to better define a more concrete direction
• Communicating system capabilities and how can they be extended
• Defining key reporting levels and recommending best ways to achieve them vs customised modifcations
• The importance of listening to and engaging with new leadership early so they are supportive of changes
• How is this all impacting the existing system development roadmap?

If your PLM system implementation fails to take into account the three “I’s”, it is unlikely that your company will realize the full potential of a PLM system, regardless of who the software supplier is. At American Eagle Outfitters, we have optimized our PLM system by doing the following:

• Providing Excel-like screens for users to INPUT data across records more efficiently, filter data effectively, and rollup information as needed
• Planning for system INTEGRATION with our current or future ERP, Purchase Order, and Assortment Planning systems
• Developing robust business INTELLIGENCE (including reports and visual analytics) as a primary deliverable, not a project afterthought

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) integrates corporate self-regulation into a business model.  As a core component of CSR, sustainability seeks to balance the economic, social responsibility, and environmental impact of a business. A&E has set the highest level of sustainability compliance in the industry through their Eco-Driven initiatives. In working with some of the world’s largest retailers and brands, they have set the bar for all textile suppliers and retailers. And, in collaboration with Gerber Technology, they have made it easy for product development teams to ensure the correct thread goes into their garments, anywhere in the world through the use of PLM.

This session will explore:

• An overview of tangible goals which consider the economic, social responsibility and environmental aspects of a global company's operations
• A&E's Eco-Driven program, consisting of the Ten Threads of Sustainability
• A practical example of how PLM is used to not only ensure compliance but deliver on the promise of CSR

Founded in 1886 as a little corset factory in Germany, today Triumph is present in 120 countries with the core brands Triumph® and sloggi® and had 2014 revenues of 1.437 billion euros. As a successful global manufacturer of lingerie, underwear, sleepwear and swimwear, Triumph is continually looking to improve its ability to maximize innovation while simultaneously managing the inherent complexity and scale of their operations. To this end, Triumph decided that they needed a business enabling technology which would allow them to achieve these goals. They turned to PLM.

Saman Ekanayake, Head of Product Development at sloggi GWF, will present their PLM journey and explains why simplifying development, adding structure, removing inefficiencies and increasing transparency are key to streamlining the development process and extending their 130-year-old tradition of innovation, dedication and success.

This session will discuss:

• Triumph’s business objectives and challenges
• Reasons to initiate a PLM project  
• How PLM can be a part of a business realignment strategy 
• Why Triumph chose Centric Software
• An overview of the project’s first results and future roll-out

Color is Not Just an Attribute – it’s a Science! 

Most product development systems treat color as a simple product attribute and largely ignore the science behind it. There are huge benefits to be derived from being able to select a color that will work from the outset, on the desired substrates, and will meet the rigorous aesthetic demands of design, merchandising teams and eventually consumers. Product color is one of the most important criterion when consumers select a product, so being able to control and manage color scientifically deep into the supply chain and removing the room for human error is a key requirement to shorten development timelines and ensure that the chosen color is the one delivered.

Find out how Kohls have deployed such as system to:

• Eliminate manual color matching, saving 7,000 man hours per year
• Improve color accuracy to within 1 delta E tolerance between fabric to paper printed chips (best in class)
• Reduce fabric standards ordered by 30%
• Create a single master color library shared throughout all of product development
• Enhance collaboration by implementing printed color management allowing all design offices to print identical color regardless of geographical location

 Discover how DeSL is pushing the boundaries of Color Lifecycle Management by:

• Extending Colour Management deep into the supply chain to ensure consistency from initial sample to final delivery
• Delivering total color collaboration between all internal departments and external vendors
• How color management can be built into 3D design technologies
• How Visual Merchandising can benefit from Total Color Management

When evaluating modern enterprise tools, half the battle is navigating the unnecessary complexity of industry jargon and acronyms. This is especially prevalent in long-standing companies built on a legacy system architecture, such as Obermeyer, a Colorado-based skiwear company.

Recognizing that they were having to contend with avoidable challenges and limitations related to their outdated systems, Obermeyer hired our speaker, Greg Bannister, to lead the move to a more modern enterprise suite.

This session will discuss:

• What did the former systems architecture look like?
• Understanding the daily challenges faced by Obermeyer across process efficiency, cost, production cycle time, inventory and 3rd party communication
• What impacts had this model of working had on profitability, transparency and ultimately, growth?
• Starting from scratch - interviewing every employee to better understand the root-cause of these problems
• Evaluating potential technology partners for an enterprise tool suite of ERP, PLM and SCM
• Exploring the aggressive 11-month deployment roadmap
• Modernizing company mentality to facilitate this change
• What have been the impacts of this modernization re-haul on company operations?

As is the case with many companies, Abercrombie & Fitch has been successful using PLM across their Design and Tech Design teams. They have also integrated their vendor base into the system to an extent. Across other parts of the business, namely Production, Planning, Merchandising, Graphics, they are struggling with information redundancies and disconnected communication across too many mediums.

Their proposed strategy to streamline the information into “one source of the truth” is not always easy. Communicating the benefits for a new internal way of working, influencing behavior changes across multiple aspects of the business, and further integration of external parties adds up to a rather complex journey.

In this session, Brandy will lead a collaborative discussion on extending PLM capability beyond the traditional PLM Design zone: why is it needed, what are the proposed benefits and finally, how to execute such a strategy from a technical, business and cultural standpoint.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index’s Benchmark for Apparel suggests customer satisfaction actually fell 2.6% between 2014 and 2015. PLM, as the vehicle that moves us from concept to consumer and back again, should really be about looking between both planning and execution, i.e. between both today’s and yesterday’s performance, but in reality focuses predominantly on product development.

The simple fact is that if we fail to connect design, development, our suppliers and the consumer into a loop that keeps these points (and more) in sync, we will never achieve the best possible results. And connecting to consumer demand isn’t magic – it’s simply about listening and responding. 

Given today’s consumers are more demanding than ever and want their desires met quickly, it is obvious that ‘Planning’ for their wishes is just not enough; if you’re not connecting the plan to supplier execution you may miss the mark and disappoint. 

In this session we will discuss how to put the Lifecycle Back into Product Lifecycle Management.

More specifically:

• How to look into the past and the future
• How to achieve sustainability from planning through execution
• How to use demand forecasting, budgeting, line planning, and critical path management
• How to work from concept though to commercialization - clear to the consumer and beyond
• How to use supplier collaboration and global commerce networks to achieve a better product lifecycle solution

In today’s challenging Retail, Footwear and Apparel industry (RFA), it is becoming more and more important to embrace state of the art technologies to gain competitive advantage. The adoption of new technologies including 3D virtual prototyping, virtual sampling in product development and shop floor machine data, leads to a bottleneck in handling large volumes of streaming data from various enterprise systems and devices, not to mention the complexities and integration challenges we face between cloud and on premise systems to achieve synchronized business process.

Although having a single source of data can be a solution to counter this problem, how we approach the unification of data sources matters. It becomes critical to orchestrate the business processes meaningfully to integrate the relevant data sources with targeted use cases.

But are businesses able to do so? If yes..

• How successful are they in utilizing the data captured to reduce the time-to-market?
• What are the challenges faced by companies in getting meaningful insights from this information?
• Are business units equipped to handle cross-platform integration brought about by company acquisitions?

The manufacturing industry has been traditionally poor at harnessing new technologies and this is no different when it comes to the digital revolution that is already well-established across other sectors including media and finance. But, given the impressive volume of data that the industry generates and collects, the mentality around digital is changing drastically and rapidly as companies begin to better understand the beneficial implications it could have across the value chain and ultimately, in their product offering.

Now that the value is understood, companies now want to understand how to best invest and harness this opportunity. Leslie Hand joins PI Apparel to discuss:

- What are the implications of a digital revolution across the fashion/apparel industry?

- Understanding the Five Pillars of Digital Success:

• Strategy & Leadership - adapting company culture and mindset to become a disruptor, making the change rather than responding to it
• Information - centralizing functions and data across the multiple layers of your business to maximize operational efficiency and transparency
• Operations - best leveraging sensors and automation to optimize production, speed and execution
• Workforce - preparing for and responding to the cultural implications of creating a new working experience and the talent gap of new roles and functions
• Omni-experience - faciliating a new radical way of approaching the multi-mode fashion model to capture performance and understand real-time market needs

- Benchmarking your digital transition against a qualitative maturity model

- How have other companies achieved digital success - examples and case studies

L.L.Bean is a 100-year old heritage company that was born out of a single product, the L.L.Bean Boot, which is still in production today. In an attempt to remain competitive and to adhere to the fluctuating demands of their consumer base, L.L.Bean has nurtured an ad hoc innovation culture across their complete product line. Fifteen months ago it was decided that this was no longer enough.

Mike Gawtry was brought into the company to tackle a very difficult challenge: how to take the existing ad hoc process, that was then underlying the creative innovation process and culture, and align this with a much more formal systems architecture, without stifling creative thinking. And so began the development of L.L.Bean's Innovation Process that would act as a facet of creation and would interface with the company's more deadline/results-orientated Mind-to-Market Process without impeding design.

This session will discuss:

• How was the existing ad-hoc approach to innovation, and its misalignment with the Mind-to-Market process, failing L.L.Bean?
• What is the Innovation Process and in what way does it interact with the rest of the product lifecycle?
• What were the incentives and vision of the Innovation Process?
• How does the alignment of the Innovation Process, the Mind-to-Market Process and PLM work at L.L.Bean?
• How was the process and its team planned and executed?
• What have been the major challenges of this transition, especially in terms of culture?
• What benefits are been realised so far? - time to market, competitiveness, relevance, sales and costs

Our offices and our workers are changing.

The new workplace is Social—it’s as much about personal connections as it is about productivity.  Intention, sharing, experience and collaboration make better thought leaders.  Empowered employees drive for results as they engage, share and create.  The best product comes from teams not individuals.  How Social is your PLM?

For 7 years Craig Crawford was a driving force behind the digital transformation at Burberry, with the Social Enterprise at its core. Now as a London based boutique consultant, he is helping other global brands harness the power of Social to be as digital on the inside as they are on the outside.

In this session, Craig will explore:

• A new type of management that involves all employees and partners
• How technology connects the brand to all employees and partners to foster emotional engagement and purpose
• How developing a rich connected culture focused on the brand above and beyond all else brings best in class results

It is sales 101 that a salesman will always tell you, the customer, exactly what you want to hear. So when you're seeking a new PLM platform and are confronted with multiple companies, each offering a very similar product and each promising you the world and more, how can you ensure you make the right choice and beyond that, ensure the partnership is sustainable and fruitful?

Keith Krystofolsky has worked in the fashion/apparel sector for many years and in this time, has worked with many of the key technology players. To ensure a long-term, impactful deployment, it is not enough to make a one off platform purchase and to facilitate the occasional dialogue between the consumer and the vendor. Instead, it needs to be a partnership. This is nothing new but fostering this kind of union in practice can be challenging. 

In this session, Keith will lead a discussion on how best to:

• Understand what motivates your vendors - what is going on behind the scenes and how may this impact your interaction?
• Tap into the aforementioned motivators and leverage them to maximize your return
• Negotiate with your vendors

Armed with real-life and first-hand success and horror stories of vendor partnerships and interaction, Keith is well equipped to help you approach new and existing vendors in a way that will ensure long-term value and return.

The set out of the exhibition hall of PI Apparel is much like the thought process of many companies when it comes to technology; there is some technology over here that does one thing and another over there that does something else. Whilst they ultimately all work together to create a more efficient pre-production landscape once deployed, they are initially kept separate in consideration and strategy. Why is this?

Bob Stevens, Sr Director, Pre-Production Systems at Nine West Holdings, joins PI Apparel to discuss the need for companies to take an entire holistic pre-production view on all of the different tools available to them and to discover early, which elements you really need and how these might talk to eachother to reduce the overall product development timeline.

This session will discuss:

• Evaluating today's process against tomorrow's plan
• What are the limitations of the current siloed model of evaluating pre-production technologies?
• Setting the table and creating a technology map that allows for holistic multi-tech evaluation versus a disjointed approach
• How might 3D and PLM be integrated collaboratively?
• How does each technology fit into the organisation and is each one really needed or could an existing platform simply extend its functionality?
• Developing an effective check process for each technological consideration
• How then should pre-production and production interact through systems integration?