Industry Summary Articles

Deuter Sport GMbH is a leading German producer of backpacks, sleeping bags and outdoor accessories. The company was founded in 1898 and began by supplying mailbags and post sacks to the Bavarian Royal Mail. Over the years, the company evolved into a renowned provider of backpacks and sleeping bags for outdoor adventurers, hikers, cyclists and mountaineers, as well as specially designed backpacks for schoolchildren.

Marco Hühn, Quality Manager at Deuter, recalls how the company was challenged by a lack of transparency and coordination across internal teams in the US and Germany as well as with their suppliers in Vietnam:

“For the past 25 years, we have had one longstanding manufacturing partner in Vietnam who makes all of our backpacks and our developers travel there a lot. Often decisions about products are made there, on the spot. In the past, these changes were not always documented very well for our teams back home… we wanted a better overview of production schedules as well as development schedules to improve workflow among our teams and with our manufacturer.”

Today, with Centric’s Outdoor PLM solution acting as a digital backbone for all product-related activities, Deuter experiences increased efficiency, transparency and accessibility of real-time product data in an organized, intuitive format.

Hühn reflects on how Centric’s PLM enables ultimate oversight over every detail of product development , “We now know much more about all of the materials we use, our BOMs are in a consistent and detailed format, we can collaborate in real time while traveling and we can see everything necessary to develop the product and approve it for production.”

As well as the operational benefits, Centric’s new, innovative outdoor PLM boosts employee satisfaction at Deuter, “We want people to have a better life at work and a better experience making products. Centric is helping make that happen.”

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