Centric Software® and ASICS, the global sports brand, are celebrating their long-term partnership with the release of a success story. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, price and sell products such as apparel, footwear, sporting goods, furniture, home décor, consumer electronics, cosmetics, food & beverage and luxury to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.
ASICS Corporation is a global designer and manufacturer of sporting goods including performance athletic footwear, apparel and accessories. The company was founded in 1949 by Kihachiro Onitsuka. Inspired by the old Latin phrase “Anima Sana In Corpore Sano”, meaning “A Sound Mind in a Sound Body”, his vision was to promote the health of young people through sport. The company is at the forefront of the performance sports market worldwide.
ASICS implemented Centric PLM™ in 2016 to replace disparate business systems used by various teams to manage the product lifecycle. Today, thousands of users like merchandisers, product developers, external suppliers and more have one reliable source for all product data, enabling better collaboration and cutting time spent searching for information.
“We can reduce the time it takes to complete the entire process from planning to development,” says Gogo Tanaka, General Manager of Digital Supply Chain at ASICS. “Product master data from Centric is integrated with downstream systems, so we avoid duplicate maintenance of data in different systems.”
In 2019, ASICS implemented Centric’s Visual Assortment Boards, empowering teams to automate line sheet creation and collaborate to visually create merchandising plans.
“I remember seeing our apparel merchandisers and development teams sitting together with a big board where they did all their merchandise mapping, using printed images,” says Orhan Guc, PLM Specialist at ASICS. “It was not easy to store those boards and retrieve data. Now any decisions that are made and related data are stored in one digital location, and other teams such as product developers can add their input and share ideas.”
ASICS uses Centric PLM and Centric Visual Boards™ across both of their divisions – footwear and apparel & accessories – to navigate the new landscape of hybrid working, reducing physical meetings and replacing them with instant digital visual collaboration to streamline their product concept to launch process.
“We are honored that ASICS have chosen to work with us since 2016, and we have deepened our partnership with the successful implementation of Centric Visual Boards,” says Chris Groves, President of Centric Software. “We look forward to working further with ASICS to streamline and strengthen their go-to-market processes.
