Slingshot Sports, the sport board company, has selected Centric Software®’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution, Centric PLM. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source and sell products such as apparel, footwear, sporting goods, furniture, home décor, cosmetics, food & beverage and luxury to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.
Founded in 1999 by brothers Jeff and Tony Logosz, Slingshot Sports is an innovative company that began with kite boards and expanded to wake, windsurf, stand up paddleboard, wing surfing and foils on the various boards. Slingshot’s parent company, 7 Nation, brought in Ride Engine, maker of the revolutionary hard-shell, customizable form-fitting kite boarding harness. Ride Engine also has a line of watersports equipment, wetsuits, bags and accessories. The products from both companies are sold in numerous countries around the globe.
Greg Kish, Product Line Manager at Slingshot Sports describes the company’s expansion into different categories. “We started with kite boarding, followed by wakeboarding, wake surfing and paddle boarding. And then a few years ago, the foil boarding trend started to really hit. That kind of shifted the business; everybody wanted hydrofoils so Slingshot embraced that with a product called the hover glide, a modular foil platform that crosses all the sports.”
With the expansion of categories came the need for better project management. Kish says, “As the sports, the brands and the SKU list grew, it has become extremely difficult to manage all that information off of line cards, Excel documents, and then trying to get that into our ERP system. And manage our supply chain, suppliers, accounting and all that communication as well.” Add to that the complicating factor that boards from each discipline are measured differently. Kish notes, “Wakeboards are measured in centimeters. Wind surfboards and wing surfing boards are measured in liters. Surfboards are measured in feet and inches, and all those differences must be captured and tied to the various categories.”
Slingshot looked at different vendors, narrowing the field down to three candidates. After several demos where the team evaluated features and talked to references about all the potential providers, they selected Centric PLM. Centric’s experience with hardgoods, the large number of references in sporting goods plus the rest of the ratings tipped the scale in Centric’s favor.
Of the Centric team Kish says, “They did a great job. Our sales rep answered a lot of questions and our implementation team has been awesome—very patient with us.”
Slingshot is looking forward to getting all the remote design and development information in one place, a single source of truth for product development. Says Kish, “Centric PLM provides visibility into the end-to-end process and houses data and designs so none of it is lost if someone leaves the company. Having that library of information, being able to access it and have transparency in our development process, is huge. Our hope is that we’re going to be able to develop products more efficiently and at a better cost structure in the future.”
Chris Groves, President and CEO of Centric Software says, “We are pleased to have such an innovative company place their trust in Centric PLM. With the complexity of Slingshot and Ride Engine’s product offerings, we are excited to be working with them to meet their needs and drive efficiency into their workflows.”
