PI Apparel 2016 Programme

You'd be hard pressed to find a growth story as successful as that of Under Armour; having achieved significant and steady revenue growth since 2005, it has become a symbol of innovation and a true contender in the sports footwear and apparel market. Whilst they have achieved a significant market share, the trick now is to ensure this is maintained, something they hope to achieve by maximizing the speed by which they are getting new products out to the market.

Dagmar Chlosta is SVP Global Operations at Under Armour and has 20+ years experience working in the PLM and virtualization space predominantly at adidas.

Dagmar joins us to discuss:

• How was the need for PLM justified and communicated?
• Setting up the PLM roadmap
• How will PLM achieve the scaleability and sustainability needed to maintain market share?
• The 10-month global PLM roll-out story - lessons learnt and challenges tackled
• Translating successes from the footwear roll-out into the UA apparel division PLM strategy
• PLM as a pre-requisite to a fully virtualised end-to-end value chain
• What will virtualisation look like at UA?
• How will a virtualised pipeline impact the UA operation? - visibility, information accessibility, cost, decision-making and speed to market
• What will be the ongoing relationship between PLM and a virtual model?

At the end of 2013 Mustang GmbH were on the hunt for a PDM system and just as they were settling on a platform, stumbled upon PLM; a system that was new to them and new to the German market. As they compared the functionality of both, the PLM consideration made them re-visit what the company really needed from a system and which would truly help them advance.

Having selected PLM in January 2014 and having achieved the initial roll-out in only 4 months, Julia Dubowy joins PI Apparel to share how they achieved such a rapid deployment and how it has reshaped how they do business.

This session will cover:

• What was the determining factor that highlighted PLM as the better choice over PDM?
• How did they select the deployment team and why?
• How was a 4-month roadmap generated and ultimately possible?
• Where was PLM originally rolled out within the company and how has it's functionality been extended since?
• Integrating PLM with other systems including ERP and Adobe Illustrator - the technical, strategic and cultural challenges
• The supplier integration pilot - how did it work and how will this be rolled out across the rest of the supplier network?
• What benefits have been realised with regards to speed, costs and time to market?
• What is in store for PLM Phase II?

Triumph has achieved significant growth since it was founded in 1886 as a little corset factory in Germany. Today, the company is present in 120 countries with its 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 maximise innovation while simultaneously managing the inherent complexity and scale of their operation. 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, 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

Helly Hansen has a long 10-year history of working with Gerber platforms including those used in pattern making and a legacy PDM system. Gerber was therefore the obvious and easiest choice for them when investing in PLM; with too many systems that were unable to communicate and thus inefficiencies across the value chain, the Helly Hansen team decided it was time to update from a PDM to a PLM platform.

Helly Hansen will present the key business challenges that indicated the need for a PLM system. They will discuss how an integrated approach between software platforms leads to supply chain agility and how this can all be accomplished by managing the data in the cloud.

Regardless of how solid your deployment strategy is, once in place, user disillusionment surrounding your PLM begins, on average, at about the 6 month mark. There are always things that the users want to improve, change or suggest and the job of the PLM core team is to ensure the excitement and momentum around the system are maintained whilst the system is changed. The challenge becomes twofold - how do you make physical system enhancements and address the gaps in the process whilst sustaining your user group engagement and buy-in? This session will focus on one important message: it is ok to have been wrong and to have made mistakes during the original implementation as long as you are willing to switch gears and ensure forward movement is maintained.

• Understanding the Lane Bryant and Catherine's PLM journey to date
• How do you keep the PLM buzz going?
• Supporting ongoing user engagement and training
• Sustaining excitement and momentum
• Maintaining higher level buy-in and support
• Optimizing the delivery of new features and functions without impeding daily roles and responsibilities
• What is next for PLM at Lane Bryant and Catherine's? - exploring capability expansion and maturing into new business areas

Over 3 years ago, Marni was acquired by Only the Brave Group and since November, have been fully integrated and focussed on maximising company-wide efficiencies. Leveraging his past experience at Artsana-Chicco, Pasquale was brought into the company to select and deploy a PLM system and beyond that, work to understand how it could be further integrated with other systems and ultimately, maximise the entire product development process from cradle to grave.

This session will discuss:

• Why was PLM integration deemed a necessary investment?
• Creating an effective PLM rollout roadmap - support, priorities, forecasts and timelines
• Understanding each project phase, their respective challenges and how these were solved
• What were the immediate short term benefits to operations?
• How has the project been developed since and what are the longer-term opportunities?
• Working on integrating new TXT versions with Gerber CAD software for added product development efficiency
• Pioneering and piloting upgraded PLM iterations
• How has moving to web versions of PLM enhanced its company-wide capability?

Following a PLM deployment in 2013, The INTERSPORT Group began recognizing inefficiencies across the private label product ranges they were building. They created 9 specific KPIs and worked with consultants to benchmark their results against their competitors in the sports and fashion sector; the findings were disappointing. The key conclusion was that they had no decent planning process; whilst historical data had been analysed, it was never done so in any kind of structured or collaborative manner with their customer base. They concluded that a change in their processes was needed immediately in order to streamline their operation.

Enter their Assortment Building Platform (ABP); whilst the role of PLM was predominantly inward-facing, the ABP, fully integrated within PLM, acts as their external communication portal. The platform allows for...

• Buyers to log in and tell INTERSPORT what they want from an assortment
• Consolidation of assortment feedback to form an international line plan
• A process that allows an advisory committee to assist in the development of the international line plan with 3 meetings (line plan meeting, design review meeting, line close meeting)
• Access to the line sheet for all national INTERSPORT organisations once the final changes made at the line close meeting are realized in PLM to:

• Build the national ranges
• Place their forecast on the models they selected
• Order samples that are needed

Markus Rist, Senior Director of Supply Chain Operations at the INTERSPORT Group will share this story before opening up the floor for a discussion around how this kind of platform and strategy has now returned them to the forefront of their market across nearly all of their KPI measurables.

Integrating PLM and ERP, and their respective data sets, has a proven track record of lowering costs, improving quality processes and expediting the product development process.

Many have already extended PLM beyond design to non-traditional areas of the business and it's integration with ERP is an inevitable essential step in providing a top-down view of the enterprise. However, the complementary roles of PLM and ERP are not always well understood, leading to complexity when implementing and connecting these two systems together. 

Having integrating these two systems together in June of this year, Julia leads this session on the do's and don't of system integration and the benefits that can be realized if this is carried out efficiently and effectively.

Between 2013 and 2014, the Aydinli Group  selected a PLM platform to manage all of their product-related data and in parallel, SAP ERP to manage all of their financial and operational information, realising huge improvements on the legacy architecture they'd worked with previously.

However, collaborating with their 350+ supplier network was still proving to be difficult and relied heavily on the internal workforce spending huge amounts of redundant time collating and prepping the necessary information for each supplier from each system accordingly.

Hakan Duran was given the task to automate this process, allowing suppliers to manage the supply chain end-to-end and today joins PI Apparel to discuss the creation of their Supplier Portal. This session will discuss:

• Pre-the Supplier Portal, how did the necessary data for each supplier get collated and dispatched and what were this model's challenges?
• Why not just integrate PLM & ERP together and create an interface?
• What does the Supplier Portal look like and how does it work to ensure only the right information is available for the right supplier at the right time?
• How did the creation of the Supplier Portal impact operational speed and workforce workload?
• How does this function as a two-way, collaborative platform?
• What are hoped to be the long-term benefits of adopting this model?
• What have been the cultural implications of this development?

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 essential that, before commercial scale production of a new season or range launch, that you have all of the design parameters for that range set out in what the industry call the range plan.

At Tommy Hilfiger PVH, issues in development were arising because their merchandisers were working partly in excel and partly in PLM and yet there was no communication or exchange between the two platforms. The result was poor alignment and transparency across the design, development and merchandising stages and practices and as such, limited efficiency.

To combat this, Tommy Hilfiger PVH recently decided to start making the moves towards an integrated range planning and PLM system. Across the 13-division company, the pilot was successfully rolled out in 2, and now another 4 are in the roll out phase. By the end of August another 6 will be brought on. In partnership with their technology provider, a basic integration framework is already in place but this is far from perfect and there are still functionality gaps that need to be addressed. 

Mirjam, who leads this effort, hosts an interactive discussion on the steps needed to successfully achieve such an integration and the challenges they have faced thus far. Come prepared to share your own experiences and successes.