Centric Software® is delighted to announce the release of a success story about its customer, Dainese.
Dainese was founded in 1972 by motorcycle enthusiast Lino Dainese. The company’s mission to ‘enable human potential’ has gone beyond motorsports to encompass safety gear and clothing for skiing, mountain biking, horse riding, sailing and even outer space with their gravity load simulation suit for the International Space Station (ISS). The proudly Italian brand also operates as an OEM (original equipment manufacturer), manufacturing products for household names such as Ducati and BMW.
Prior to Centric PLM™, Dainese’s outdated, offline technology systems were struggling to keep pace with rapid company growth. The complexity of their product mix added a huge strain to teams, who were tied up with admin and long certification timelines when they should have been focusing on innovation.
“Our processes were not digitized… teams were working in Excel where they tracked every aspect of product development, including homologation and certification. With 4 product categories and around 20 sub-categories, you can imagine how that was extremely complicated,” explains Luca Menegardo, CIO at Dainese.
The objective of their PLM project was to de-complexify the way products were developed and introduce standardized approaches across the business. This was vital considering the rigorous safety checks and certifications products had to pass before they could be sold on the market.
“We cannot compromise on security – everything we do is certified. Firstly, the product must satisfy extreme technical and mechanical tests in our labs. Then you need to run a different homologation process to sell it around the world,” elaborates Menegardo.
Implementation across multiple departments including the commercial team, product managers, product marketing, R&D, sourcing, quality and supply chain was achieved in just 9 months, 90% of that achieved remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Roberto Conte, PLM Project Manager, is impressed with the functionality of the system and its ability to handle complex data sets.
“We are already managing more than 3,000 styles, 10,000 color variants and 9,000 materials within Centric PLM,” says Conte. “Thanks to the smooth implementation we have been able to define a paradigm within the company on how to run a successful project,” adds Menegardo.
