Client based research by Fashion PLM specialists WFX has shown that attitudes towards collaboration with suppliers are changing. It finds that fashion companies increasingly want to not only use their Product Lifecycle Management software as the main creation platform for their style information, but also as the main collaboration platform with their suppliers.
WFX already offered a messaging platform within their system, logging activity at a style level. As a result from their client research WFX have now decided to do a major upgrade, bringing the functionality of PLM in line with its customers most demanding requests.
The benefits of collaboration are clear to the fashion companies involved. They are able to connect and work with their suppliers on a product whilst using the same tool to develop, cost and approve it. This means in practice that there is more control but also that the one area where cost reduction is still an obvious option, the development cycle itself, can now be partially outsourced to the supplier. Suppliers as such would become more service oriented themselves in this process, which is exactly what the upgrades cater for.
Because their cloud Fashion PDM and PLM platform is subscription based the new functionality will become available to the more than 10.000 users across the globe without the need for any of them to take action.
When asked what the main benefits are of collaboration and communication integration Jatin Paul from World Fashion Exchange explained: “This is not about making it possible to send emails through a non-email specific system. This is about having a sophisticated addition to the system that provides a complete trail on all your product related information. Not just in a basic inbox, but categorised and actually embedded within the stylefile or techpack.”
Jatin Paul continues to say: “Being able to work within a style and collaborate with someone on that style with full history is something we already offered. Now we are extending that to the much deeper functionality usually associated with sophisticated mail platforms such as Outlook or social media sites such as Facebook. It will give our customers the level of functionality that will make the system feel much more like a communication tool.”
The upgrade to the messaging functionality is part of the upcoming new WFX Fashion PLM release, which is expected to be rolled out across the platform in the coming weeks.
