From Ferragamo To Herno…..The Italian Fashion Industry Chooses Centric Software

Image Courtesy of Centric Software

There is ‘made in Italy’  behind PLM'S continuous innovation for fashion and luxury, developed in Silicon Valley by Centric Software.

Italian brands such as Ferragamo, Herno and Buccellati lead with their requests in the field the development of the platform and its services, including mobile apps and the recent integration with 3D Cad for product virtualization.

The formula of Centric Software, controlled by Dassault Systèmes since 2018, is simple: "If we want to be always innovative in the development of software and its applications, we must directly confront the innovators who, in the field of luxury and fashion, are located in Italy", explains CEO and founder Chris Groves Netflix's neighbor in California.

The choice of name, "Centric", also refers to the centrality of the customer in the company strategy.

It also includes concepts such as continuous innovation, because technology ages immediately; talent, so Centric Software has equipped itself with the best engineers and developers on the market and collaboration with the best names in different industries.

So, when ten years ago the company entered the Italian market, the approach was to make itself available to our main brands, some of which today sit on its Customer Advisory Board, to receive stimuli on the development of solutions.

"Our offer for Italy comes from conversations with customers: it is from the exchange with them that Centric Plm "Made for Italy" was born, the dedicated offer that we are launching now. We spent a lot of time with them figuring out how to make our technologies really useful and functional. We absorb technological innovation in Silicon Valley every day, but our model does not go from the center to the periphery, but is glocal: we listen to local customers and find solutions tailored to them", explains Ron Watson, Vice President of Product Development Centric Software.

A winning model for Italy, which has a productive fabric made of craftsmanship, tradition and excellence, but also needs process and product innovation to maintain its competitiveness on the markets.

Centric Software's intuition was therefore not to develop software to be customized, customer by customer, with pieces of code, but that of a platform that can be configured and adaptable to different needs.

"This is the best solution for Italy, because each customer has their own specific way of developing the product, making it unique and often excellent. In practice, the software is adaptable on their part and, at the same time, evolves to respond to new processes, teams, products, as the market is constantly evolving. The winning combination is that of a team of technicians and specialists in Silicon Valley, who are however guided by the market and by the customers themselves around the world", comments Watson. 

Thus, magnifying glass on fashion and luxury in Italy, a market that produces 40% of the world's luxury goods, where dynamism and innovation go hand in hand with a strong artisan tradition.

A challenge that adds to those typical of time-to-market, marginality, sustainability, responsiveness to the market and that, to be won, need cutting-edge and "tailor-made" technologies.

Hence the idea of Centric Plm "Made for Italy", modular and completely configurable, modelled for an extremely heterogeneous context in terms of company size, sector specialization declined in the various districts and with different spending capacity.  

The advantages of a Plm for Italian fashion Silvano Joly, Country Manager Italy Centric Software The main advantage of an advanced product lifecycle management (Plm) platform is real-time collaboration, fast exchange of later versions, and vision of work progress across everyone involved, from style office to suppliers, from production to distribution.

The virtuous effects of this data integration and shared work is faster go-to-market and greater agility in responding to changing market demands, maintaining quality and aiming for sustainability.

We work together seamlessly, without bottlenecks or slowdowns in the exchange of information or in the visualization of the models and impacts of the various phases of the processes on costs and the environment.

All processes and steps are monitorable, shareable, comparable and updatable in real time. "Our platform, which can be integrated with other advanced technologies, offers much more than a classic plm. In fact, it allows to manage the entire process, from the conception to the marketing of the product in the point of sale or online, along three lines: the exchange of product development data, exploiting existing systems (Erp, Pim, Pdm); integration with 2D/3D Cad tools that can be activated by the platform; the interface can be customized with extremely versatile and immediate PCs and apps, for example in broadcasting sessions or for factory audits", says Silvano Joly, Country Manager Italia Centric Software.