Integrate to Innovate: Building a Modern Information Environment
Be it luxury or loungewear, fashion businesses aim to make products that sell, using methods that are as quick, cost-efficient, and sustainable as possible. Due to market pressure and the quickening pace of consumer demand, product quality and profit margins are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, and organizations of all shapes and sizes are turning to technology.
Chief among those challenges in the immediate term are long lead times. This can lead to missed trend opportunities or shortened selling cycles, and are typically caused by inefficiencies in design and development. A brand’s inability to react to market trends in a timely way will threaten the profitability of the entire business.
Retailers, brands and manufacturers around the world have begun to seek greater visibility into the virtual lives of their products.
Over the long term, the very same obstacles will most likely restrict the business’s ability to pursue other common strategic goals:
– Introducing new product categories;
– Iterating with existing components to promote product variety and diversify across their retail channels;
– Launching new capsule collections;
– Dispensing different inventories between online and physical sales and going omni-channel;
– Adapting existing product lines to the cultural characteristics of new markets.
But although they manifest in a wide variety of ways, each of these obstacles can be ascribed to one common internal issue: a lack of consistent, reliable information with which internal departments can work.
It is for this reason that retailers, brands, and manufacturers around the world have begun to embrace technology, seeking to gain greater visibility into the virtual lives of their products – the digital data concerning each and every product that runs from design to delivery – and to use it to better address market needs.
This desire for insight can (at least in some cases) be gratified at the single process level by implementing new technologies. Supply chain management, for instance, can be streamlined through the introduction of a point solution designed for that purpose.
But achieving transparency for the entire enterprise – working towards true operational agility and, eventually, a data-driven business transformation – requires a more calculated approach, with multiple different avenues leading towards the same information environment.
I . T. Requires integration
While a large, multinational brand may potentially have more than a hundred different solutions and repositories for storing essential product information, integration is still not a topic that small-scale organizations can ignore.
Any modern brand, irrespective of size, is extending their I.T. ecosystem – consciously or not – to keep up with market demand. Compliance and auditing tools, 3D sampling solutions, and mobile applications have all been introduced to address the emerging importance of, respectively, corporate social responsibility, consistent fit, and the nomadic nature of the modern workforce.
But while each of these solutions serves a single need, their true value emerges when they are integrated into one cohesive system. Because regardless of how rapidly the extended-PLM landscape expands and diversifies, all of the solutions it encompasses must share one common currency: data.
Material information, for example, is not only essential during design and product development, but is also equally valuable in sourcing, sampling, fitting, quality assurance and marketing. But the exhaustive material characteristics which were keyed into the system during the early stages of a product’s lifecycle are typically left in a disconnected solution, where their value is limited. Meanwhile, an integrated information environment allows greater value to be extracted from one contiguous thread of data at all stages of the product lifecycle.
All of the solutions that PLM encompasses must share a common currency: data
This level of integration, though, requires one missing element: a single, centralized location in which that data can be saved, and from which it can be easily extracted. A source of intelligence that is up-to the- minute, actionable, and accurate.
For multinational megaretailers and the mass market alike, PLM has proven its worth as that source. Emerging alongside Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) as the backbone of the modern fashion business, PLM is being increasingly embraced by the mass market as 89% of global PLM sales for the fiscal years 2014/15 were to medium to small-scale businesses.
What does it mean to integrate?
While a PLM project can certainly become all-encompassing and is likely to be one of the most significant investments a brand or retailer will make in its future, establishing a common source of enterprise data is only one part of the puzzle. Understanding the benefits of building a truly integrated information environment requires a broader analysis of how solutions and their users can work effectively together.
“Data cleansing” involves identifying redundant data, determining what information matters, and preparing it for platform-agnostic use.
At its most basic level, integration establishes a form of information interchange that allows data from one or more fields to automatically, seamlessly populate a related field in another application, without manual intervention. This can be bespoke (an intermediary script, coded by hand in-house) or standardized, whereby the vendor of a particular solution has previously established integrations to one or more popular third-party products.
Integration is accomplished by either calls to the common language of an application protocol interface (API), the installation of third-party middleware or the use of standardized integration, or the creation of a bespoke interface. These are listed in order of preference, since custom coding is seldom cost-effective – especially when compared to the simplicity and value of an open, well-documented platform.
While PLM project teams and I.T. professionals may initially be tempted to integrate every conceivably useful function of every system, decisions must be made based on individual value, since the information that one solution requires may not necessarily be applicable to another. This is not to say that data should be discarded, but rather that the transformative potential of integration lies in understanding precisely when and where (rather than just how) systems should communicate with one another.
A large part of the modern information architect’s role is therefore to coordinate with end users and executives, and to conduct a thorough inspection of the data that currently exists, and how it might be consolidated and prioritized to greater effect. This process (commonly referred to as “data cleansing”) involves identifying redundant data, determining what information matters, and preparing it for platform-agnostic use.
The latter is one element of integration that is often overlooked: the need for one set of data which is intelligible to any system. It is not uncommon in a brand or retail environment to find, for instance, that a single shade of black is given several different numerical or alphanumerical color codes. Black, deep black, BLK, #000000 or any other codes may refer to the same color, making the definition of a single labelling convention essential if the cleansed information residing in PLM is to be used consistently across the extended PLM ecosystem.
The pillars of the product lifecycle
Analysts generally agree that PLM and ERP constitute the two pillars of a modern information environment, and while this paper tackles the topic of their integration first, this is not solely because they are popular. With their vastly different functions, data paradigms, and usage methods, bringing PLM and ERP together encapsulates the essence of integration: sharing data between departments which typically do not perform tasks of the same nature.
With its decades-long headstart in the retail, footwear and apparel industry, ERP has become ingrained in many brands’ corporate strategies. As a result, PLM project teams often encounter difficulties in attempting to reconcile data models and user mindsets between the two; the commercial and creative sides of the business do not always recognize their influence on one another. One is accustomed to working with scientific sales configurators, while the other assembles a bill of materials based on aesthetic and functional values. One handles finished goods; the other, components. One is focused on the bottom line; the other, on hemlines and fabrics.
For a modern brand to remain competitive, though, distribution, sales, and accounting teams must share common goals with their colleagues working on product design and development. As such, their toolkits must contain at least some of the same essential elements; this principle applies especially to information.
For a modern brand to remain competitive, distribution, sales and accounting teams must share common goals with their colleagues working on product design and development.
These two exclusive job functions must share the same core data, which must be integrated between their respective solutions (PLM and ERP).
Choices made at the product development level affect market performance, and vice versa. While design and development are often disassociated from the rest of the business, fashion does not exist in a vacuum, and lacklustre sales may mean a reevaluation of either the creative aspects of the product (its durability, fit, or style), or the strategies behind its commercial distribution is needed. Markdowns will most likely prompt a collaborative reassessment of both.
It stands to follow, then, that these two superficially exclusive job functions must nevertheless share the same core data, which must be integrated between their respective solutions (PLM and ERP) if changes are to be made at one end of the spectrum and reflected at the other. This requires both people and information to work together, ensuring continuity from a product’s conception, into the extended supply chain and production, and on to marketing and sales.
And it requires a two-way flow of information.
Moving beyond manual
I It may seem outdated to talk about manual data entry in 2016, but for many businesses, it is still a reality – particularly when a brand or retailer has grown quickly and exceeded the limited capacity of their original information environment. In these scenarios, manual workarounds and data input by hand may even seem like an acceptable compromise between the current process and a longer-term integration project.
As I.T. architects know, however, any manual intervention represents a broken link in the chain of integrated information – one whose negative effects will only become compounded when newly-changed information must be extracted from one system and re-entered into the original, causing duplicate data flows and versioning conflicts.
Integrated intelligence
With a bidirectional interface between key sets of information – everything from demographic appropriate 3D avatars to retail KPIs – in place, brands and retailers are able to build workflows that transcend system, language and geographical barriers. In this sense, an integrated environment becomes a tool for individuals as well as executive-level decision-making – a place where high-level oversight and a granular level of insight into any stage of the product lifecycle become possible.
But for the information technologist or architect, and the end users they support, the benefits of API-level information integration are more concrete and more immediate:
– A hyperconnected workflow without arbitrary separation between solutions;
– A consistent user experience – particularly when a family of solutions is provided by a single vendor;
– Elimination of redundant data, and reduced reliance on costly middleware and bespoke integration;
– Reduced maintenance load, as point solutions become consolidated to adapt to a broader information environment;
– Single-sign-on functionality for popular CAD tools, providing designers with a comfortable environment that seamlessly integrates and interchanges information with PLM;
– An improved visual experience for creatives, as 3D and 2D CAD gain the ability to share their information with patternmaking tools, reducing data load across intensive design and development processes;
– Archival of essential product images and metadata in a Product Information Management or Digital Asset Management solution, enabling Adobe Creative Suite users, and users of similar tools, to extract them for marketing and consumer-engagement purposes;
– Straightforward links between popular sustainability standards and existing supplier management modules, enabling data transparency in vital areas of the business.
Effective, well thought-out integration may be seen as the intermediary step between solution deployment and the broader journey towards business transformation, but these examples are merely illustrative. The potential for unexploited value is virtually limitless and the latest generation of I.T. professionals will be instrumental in uncovering it.
Source: Lectra
