PTC today announced that C&A Europe, a leading fashion retail business, has selected the PTC FlexPLM® retail product lifecycle management (PLM) solution to manage the development of its fashion products and provide a single source of information for merchandisers, designers, developers, buyers, and external production teams, supporting profitability and future growth plans.
With dispersed operations and a need to increase operational and inventory efficiency, C&A carried out an in-depth product evaluation before selecting PTC’s retail PLM solution. This decision was based on PTC’s vast experience and success in large retail and fashion projects, as well as its robust solution capabilities. Using PTC FlexPLM to improve collaboration and increase the visibility of all product-related information across its global organization and supply chain, C&A expects to shorten lead times and reduce costs associated with the development of its fashion products.
“We chose the PTC FlexPLM solution for its ease of use and broad set of capabilities, including its strong workflow support and the ability to get started quickly,” said Andreas Reidick, head of function buying services and operations department (BSOD), C&A. “The PTC Value Roadmap tool helped us clearly identify the link between improvements in our product development processes and our corporate objectives. PTC FlexPLM provides a world-class collaborative platform between our internal teams and our external partners, which we expect will lead to a significant increase in company productivity and profitability.”
PTC FlexPLM will provide C&A with an adaptable enterprise platform to support product development operations. This will enable C&A to improve sample tracking and also accelerate the first sample loop. By eliminating previous legacy systems, including Excel spreadsheets and email, C&A will have better data quality – allowing better order quality with suppliers. This also reduces the need for correcting and manually re-entering data, further improving operational efficiency and productivity.
“PTC FlexPLM reconciles engineering data and processes with retail-related data and processes, creating special value for this unique industry,” said Eric Symon, general manager, retail business unit, PTC. “We are very pleased that C&A has chosen our solution to help shape its future.”
C&A will use PTC’s Cloud Services offering to manage and host the solution. This will enable faster time to value, reduced risk and strain on internal IT teams, a level of guaranteed system performance reliability, and lower cost of ownership.
The deployment coincides with the recent announcement by IDC, the premier global market intelligence firm, that has named PTC as a retail PLM leader in its 2016 research report, “IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Retail Brand Product Innovation and PLM 2016 Vendor Assessment.” In the report, IDC states the PTC FlexPLM solution helps retailers and brand owners simplify the complex challenges of bringing products to market – with robust solution functionality, workflow automation, visibility, and connectivity across consumers, products, stores, designers, and supply chains.