Retailers’ product lifecycle practices often are legacy-based, disparate, inefficient and error-prone, largely due to a lack of standards. Outdated systems lead to subpar product lifecycle management (PLM) execution, resulting in a tremendous impact on the bottom line. Retailers can refresh these practices and improve results with a choice of PLM applications, revealed a new report from IDC Retail Insights.

The IDC report, titled: Worldwide Retail Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Applications 2012 Vendor Assessment, provides a detailed vendor assessment of the retail PLM applications market as it applies to apparel, footwear and hardlines products. The evaluation covers both quantitative and qualitative market and vendor characteristics. 

IDC Retail insights defines PLM as “software applications and solutions that bring together a number of activities required to develop, track, manage and control the branded or exclusive products, from product conception through order fulfillment,” according to the report.

Retailers that utilize these solutions can reap a number of benefits, including:

• The ability to harmonize decisions at each step of the product lifecycle, resulting in more profitable product launches;
• Concise data integration, creating one version of truth for all items; and
• Detailed orchestration, such as alerts, reporting and dashboards, to enable better communication and collaboration, and allow shorter product development lifecycles.

"PLM empowers employees to do what they do best and return to their core competencies: designers can design products, supply chain managers can optimize well-orchestrated and instrumented supply networks, and merchants can optimize assortments for efficient buying and selling," stated Leslie Hand, Research Director for IDC Retail Insights and author of the report. "By enabling collaboration up and down the supply chain, retailers can not only reduce the cost of doing business, but improve performance for all supply chain partners. With retail PLM, merchants can develop ‘fashion’ products closer to customer demand, enabling fresh and inviting assortments that improve customer loyalty and sales."

Vendors assessed in the report include: Centric Software; Core Solutions; Dassault Systemes; Gerber; Lectra; NGC; PTC; SAP; Siemens; and TradeStone Software.