Centric Software® is delighted to announce the release of a success story about its customer, Swarovski.
Founded in 1895 in Austria, the company designs, manufactures and sells fine crystal, gemstones, jewelry and accessories, Swarovski Created Diamonds and zirconia as well as crystal objects and home accessories. Swarovski Crystal Business has a global reach to about 140 countries and employs more than 18,000 people. Swarovski sells direct-to-consumer as well as via retailers, with limited sales of crystals as raw materials to select, high-end brands.
The company found themselves in the situation of having implemented two different PLM systems within several months of each other, to serve separate departments. Even during the implementation of one PLM, it became apparent that the system lacked the functionality Swarovski needed. To make up the shortfall, their expert IT team customized the PLM to get it up to speed. Then the next hurdle was to get the two PLM systems to talk to each other. Head of Brand Operations Marketing at Swarovski, Martin Buchbauer says, “We tried to connect those two systems to one another and also to our ERP. It was highly complex to create these connections. We operated like this for a couple of years, but weren’t satisfied.”
Swarovski decided to go down to one PLM, and began their search with the obvious choice—the other legacy system they were using—but after just a few exploratory sessions, it was clear that another solution needed to be found. Once contact was made with Centric Software, things moved quickly. Buchbauer says, “We explained our situation and within a very short time—a couple of weeks—Centric managed to set up some demo sessions and use-cases.”
Among the benefits that convinced Swarovski to select Centric PLM™ were seamless integration with ERP, automating a new idea-to-shelf process, increased data accuracy and what turned out to be a whopping 93% reduction in the number of spreadsheets!
