Product lifecycle: Infor Fashion PLM's unique approach to the ready-to-wear sector

Infor recently announced the launch of Infor Fashion PLM, a brand new application, built from the ground up, which aims to link the difficult and vital areas of 'softlines' product development through to the supply chain. Its expertise covers everything from planning, design, development and sourcing, to production, stock management, customers and distribution. We'll go into more detail on these points in this PLM guide.
Infor Fashion PLM has been designed with a fresh approach and the latest technology to help brands, manufacturers and private label retailers create styles and materials faster and more efficiently, with more consistent quality and on time delivery.

This release means that Infor has become the first integrated ERP vendor that can offer a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution across discrete manufacturing, manufacturing process and manufacturing and retail in the fashion and ready-to-wear sector.

Infor Fashion PLM: the story of a long fashion show

Thanks to a series of successive acquisitions, Infor has long had a number of different elements underpinning its PLM and ERP functionalities in the fashion sector. From the former Lawson Software company came Infor M3 ERP and Freeborders PLM, while the former SSA Global company contributed to what are today the Infor System21 ERP and Runtime PLM offerings. The problem with these combinations was that they were written as if they stood alone and also had different focuses in the apparel industry. Freeborders had more functionality for retailers and importers, while Runtime was more suited to overseas garment manufacturers.

Following the acquisition of Lawson, Infor decided on its product positioning strategy and the decision was made to select the best concepts from the two PLM products, rewrite it on the Microsoft.NET Framework, make it interoperable and add new functionality such as assortment planning (which major fashion PLM vendors do not generally have). The version currently available is primarily concerned with managing a product's technical data (PDM) and includes critical path management, but external collaborative PLM will come later, probably in the near future. The offering is available for internal deployment at this stage.

This brand new PLM solution is a key component of Infor Fashion, which is set to be one of the most powerful application suites on the market today. As can be seen in Figure 1, Infor Fashion PLM supports the design process, the new collection development cycle and streamlines the overall planning process. It is designed to act as the platform and hub for a product development team so that organisations can deliver better products to consumers faster, while eliminating unnecessary costs.

The refined Look & Feel of Fashion PLM

Infor Fashion PLM supports the parallel development and execution of new styles to speed up processes and shorten time-to-consumer. Many common and time-consuming repetitive tasks are automated and handled behind the scenes, allowing fashion designers to focus on creativity and innovation. As shown in diagrams 2 and 3, the new user experience aims to make this solution quick to learn, resulting in faster user adoption and reduced training time during the implementation cycle. Each collection, its style and its components are accessible via an intuitive user interface (UI).

Infor Fashion PLM can interact with ERP-type information systems, which should enable original design concepts to be clearly communicated and accurately executed throughout all phases of development, production and distribution to the end customer. With the full Infor Fashion suite, organisations should soon have all the tools they need to convert creative concepts into commercial products faster and more accurately, with reduced lead times, lower costs and guaranteed quality.

How will Infor Fashion PLM be deployed?

While competitors such as Lectra, PTC, Dassault Systemes, Centric Software, NGC, SAP AFS (Apparel & Footwear Solution), TradeStone Software and others should take notice, it will be interesting to see how Infor's challenge will affect the market.

It is also important that Infor combines the new Infor Fashion PLP module with its Infor M3 and Infor System21 ERP products so that the product has an integrated original style/colour/size matrix for use throughout the process, from ordering and purchasing to production and shipping. Infor has a number of existing Fashion PLM customers who are hoping to migrate to the new Infor Fashion PLM. On the other hand, standalone PDM/PLM users are vulnerable to being targeted by other PLM competitors in the fashion sector. Infor already has a broader PLM than many suppliers and a wide range of specific companies in the fashion sector to leverage the user experience. Over the next few months we'll see how things unfold.