Building on its strategy to develop innovations that drive retail transformation for brands, retailers and manufacturers, Centric Software announces Centric Visual Innovation Platform or Centric VIP. Centric VIP is a visual, fully digital collection of boards for touch-based devices like iPad, iPhone and large-scale, touch-screen televisions. This new platform provides a strategic-level overview for executives, drill-down capabilities for users and mass automation of executive decision making. Centric VIP transforms decision making and automates execution to truly collapse time to market and distance to trend.
Centric VIP is a platform of digital boards – from mood boards to material and style boards to allocation and merchandising, line and sales boards – and results in dramatic improvements in information accuracy and a massive boost in execution speed. Adoption by executive, creative, merchandising, product development and sourcing teams has been overwhelmingly positive. Current users boast that Centric VIP increases the productivity of 1 PLM user by a factor of 10.
Today, key steps of the fashion and apparel creation, development and commercialization process are centered around a manual and cumbersome mix of large foam core boards, print outs of sketches, magazine tear-outs, bits of fabric and trim, chips of color, post-its, stickers and Velcro. It is a time-consuming process prone to error with output impossible to communicate and execute quickly and accurately. However, until now, there has not been a technology innovation suited for this type of very collaborative, very visual, creative but also analytical, group decision making and execution oriented process.
“Centric VIP was conceived in close, on-site partnerships with the world’s leading brands and retailers, and is a fully market driven, game changing innovation,” explains Humberto Roa, VP of Innovation at Centric Software. This new platform focuses on three areas: ideation and collaboration, what-iffing and decision making, and mass, automated execution of decisions. As information is projected on a giant touch-screen television, macro or micro level views can be manipulated with individuals contributing via their own devices, drilling down into details as needed.
Completely visual, Centric VIP enables creative brainstorming linked to the business context. Boards draw from existing information or new ideas and decisions are recorded, making them available to everyone digitally, in real-time. Determining first level line plans, pairing fabrics and bodies, tracking adds/drops, incorporating feedback from sales, finalizing unit commitments and more can be performed in a group context with multiple sources of input.
Users can play with what-if scenarios using real-time information, with changes automatically tracked and decisions recorded. This eliminates the need to record minutes of meetings, enter changes into PLM post-meeting or wait for manual sign off.
The mass execution of decisions is automated, drastically boosting accuracy and speed. Teams can mass create and update cascading changes, severely reducing the risk of error and miscommunication while greatly accelerating the development process. Approvals and tasks are automatically routed to their corresponding owners.
“Centric VIP is a dramatic innovation that transforms our customers’ business by collapsing their time to market, delivering massive streamlining and speeding their execution. It is truly a game changing innovation,” says Chris Groves, President and CEO of Centric Software.
Centric Software is pleased to announce a series of worldwide seminars to see and try Centric VIP in person:
- June 21: New York City
- June 27: Göteborg
- June 28: London
- June 29: Milan
- July 4: Paris
- July 6: Munich
- July 21: Shanghai
- July 27: Salt Lake City
- July 28: Shenzhen
