In Stay Sharp Episode 134, The Flex Factor: How Retail Rewrote the Rules of PLM, co-hosts Juliann Grant and Jonathan Scott sit down with returning guest Brion Carroll, CEO and Principal Consultant at Digital Solution Group, LLC. Brion, one of the first creators of PDM, explained how it came about in Stay Sharp Episode 130, and this time he’s back to discuss how PLM spread to industries in retail manufacturing. While the conversation focuses on fashion, it also serves as an roadmap for any other industries that aren’t traditional engineering.
A Different Kind of Product
Working Timberland, the footwear manufacturer, to select a PLM was Brion’s first experience with a retail customer, and his first step was a significant mindset change. Apparel is broken down into pieces, but those aren’t “parts” in the traditional sense that would be reused elsewhere—though materials can be.
Brion Carroll, CEO and Principal Consultant of Digital Solution Group, LLC
This resulted in changes to how they structured data in PLM, as well as what the UI looked like. The key here was that the people in design or merchandising or at factory A or factory B needed to see a BOM in a non-engineering way. It couldn’t be only engineering-focused.
He says, “It took me a day or so to get my head wrapped around the fact that it’s materials constructed in a certain way to generate the product of a shoe or a shirt or a hat or whatever, and that they look at materials as the core of what they do.” Jonathan agrees, “It’s a different way of thinking because of how the product gets constructed.”
To make PLM fit retail footwear’s needs, Brion refers to needing to “soften a PLM system,” meaning they adjusted the data model of PTC Windchill, the system they were building the retail solution on top of. “We said a part in Windchill is the style and then it has children, colorway, which is also a part,” he explains. “Both could have BOMs and sources and all these kinds of things, which is inherent.”
Costing was another way they had to think differently—specifically, they had to be more cost-forward. As Jonathan explains, “You don’t start necessarily with all the design details and working out who’s your partner. You got to get to the partner and work through cost with them.” Brion points out another big lesson learned: this kind of product development has to involve everyone. It can’t be engineering drives it and everyone else figures out how to build it, it’s a cross-functional project.
Making PLM Do More for More People
Footwear specifically added complexity because suppliers needed to show cost in the system before anything was ever produced, which could mean multiple or consolidated suppliers for multiple production plants. Footwear is also an industry where factories must be able to log into the PLM system themselves and get specific instructions—a BOM—that’s just for their unique production line and suppliers.
Brion says, “For the apparel, they kind of do it in house, intimated with the material supplier, and then shoot it out as a tech pack and get costing, validation, sampling, all that stuff.” But with footwear, he adds, “A lot of people come in and intimate themselves with what’s being built.”
Brion describes a process of working with a succession of major manufacturers—from Reebok and Liz Claiborne to Victoria’s Secret and Nike—and slowly gathering insight into commonalities and distinctions among them, all of which helped them understand how to make adjustments to data modeling. That collected experience enabled his team to round out PTC’s FlexPLM’s offerings.
Lessons for Any PLM Practitioner
Brion points out some lessons-learned through his years of implementing PLM in retail and other industries that can be applied to any manufacturer making any product anywhere. One is not to reinvent the wheel. His team built their PLM solution on top of Windchill in order to leverage an existing, highly scalable platform. Another is to create a system that will share the data with any party that’s involved in your manufacturing process, to ensure they always have the most up-to-date information.
But most importantly, he says, you should bring everyone together. “There’s no reason why people in engineering and manufacturing and sourcing, supply chain management, and product line management, and business can’t sit in the same room and talk about what they could use PLM for,” he says. “Because it’s not just engineering, it’s a business.”
Learn More About PLM for Non-Traditional Industries
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including why Brion says change management is a totally different beast in retail manufacturing, how a BOM with multiple views can prevent “forking” your data, where the “flex” in FlexPLM came from, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 134: The Flex Factor: How Retail Rewrote the Rules of PLM and join us each week for a new podcast.
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