Centric Software® is pleased to announce that in 2023, brands and retailers from across the globe are accelerating more targeted assortment decisions by adopting Centric Visual Boards TM to get to the heart of consumer demand. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products such as fashion, outdoor, luxury, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.
Centric Visual Boards transform the assortment planning and merchandising process by leveraging modern tech to link people, processes, and systems in an easy to use, visual format.
“Multimillion and even billion-dollar retailers are still relying on personal productivity tools like spreadsheets, slideshows, and emails for critical assortment decisions. In a product-driven industry, this creates a gap between creative and data-driven roles, rendering teams unable to deliver the precise, well-curated assortments that consumers demand,” explains Humberto Roa, VP of Innovation at Centric Software. “Planning, merchandising, buying, design, and development teams need to be able to view, pivot, and update assortments with a visual-first orientation. But of course, the information needed to bring the best possible assortments to market comes from many different sources and in many formats. Visual Boards brings all of that together so brands and retailers can deliver more targeted assortments to the right channels and stores, at the right time.”
Centric Visual Boards can be compared to visual pivot tables that use images to represent vast amounts of data from any PLM, PIM, Planning or ERP system. Interactive tools are populated with real-time information that can be employed by every role from design, planning, merchandising and buying, to procurement, sourcing, marketing and sales. The Centric Visual Boards family includes boards for assortment planning, product ideation and for delivering digital buy-ready omnichannel showrooms. This empowers teams to optimize end-to-end range category management, buying processes and to deliver closer to consumer demand.
Centric Visual Boards are used by major global brands and retailers such as ASICS, Swarovski, Lands’ End, Kmart, Arc’teryx, Eileen Fisher, Givenchy, FILA and more.
“It’s like the Tower of Babel where you have the creative people speaking their language and the data geeks speaking only data, but Centric Visual Boards act as the translator,” says Jose Perez, Senior PLM Brand Operations at Swarovski.
Centric Visual Boards customers have experienced benefits such as 90% faster assortment creation and update time, and 75% faster buy session setups. Others have saved millions in operational and travel costs, redirected time to value-added work and innovation, elevated sustainability, and saved countless hours of time.
“Centric Visual Boards are a unique innovation that we have developed in close collaboration with our customers,” says Chris Groves, CEO of Centric Software. “As part of our seamless concept-to-replenishment user experience, Centric Visual Boards deliver a collaborative visual platform for informed assortment decision-making and swift end-to-end execution, ultimately empowering our customers to thrive in a competitive and unpredictable retail environment.”
