Just Style Excellence Awards 2024: Centric Software

Centric Software has won in the 2024 Just Style Excellence Awards in four categories namely Innovation, Research and Development, M&A, and Product Launches.

While Centric Software’s R&D excellence is showcased through its development of intelligent, robust tools that provide detailed insights for informed decision-making, its innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) has been continuing since 2018 when it embedded AI into its Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution for image search.

The company’s flagship and best-of-breed solution, Centric PLM™, particularly stands out in the market as the only Product Lifecycle Management solution capable of managing multi brands, multi categories and multi processes for consumer goods brands, retailers and manufacturers of any size. The solution brings cost savings, reduces time to market, and improves efficiencies for thousands of companies around the world.

Centric Planning™ solution, enhanced with new market-driven innovations in 2023, stood out in the Product Launches category, while a strategic acquisition resulted in a cutting-edge pricing and inventory solution.

In this interview, we speak with Ravi Rangan, Chief Technology Officer at Centric Software, who shares his insights into how the company's innovative solutions have contributed to their success at the 2024 Just Style Excellence Awards. Ravi discusses Centric's groundbreaking use of artificial intelligence, which help brands and retailers streamline operations, improve decision-making and optimize pricing and inventory strategies. He also delves into the measurable ROI that clients have experienced and how Centric’s solutions are supporting sustainability initiatives within the industry.

Ravi Rangan: Centric Software focuses on using AI pragmatically to address real-world needs in fashion, retail and consumer goods. We collaborate closely with customers to implement AI where it creates the most impact—enhancing decision-making, streamlining product development, and optimizing pricing, inventory and assortments. The vastness of data available for in-season operations has accelerated our in-season AI capabilities with tools like Centric Market Intelligence™ providing real-time insights into consumer behaviour and competitor pricing, and Centric Pricing & Inventory™ leveraging machine learning for in-season predictive analytics to provide forward-facing forecasts, intelligent pricing and inventory recommendations towards optimized prescriptive automation. We have recently launched Centric AI Fashion Inspiration™ that integrates generative AI capabilities into Centric PLM™ to enhance the design process for companies of all sizes. This customer-focused approach to innovation combined with a ‘most impactful’ use case approach has been key to our success in the Innovation category, while at the same time guiding customers to actionable priorities and facilitating change management and adoption challenges, especially as it relates to AI based automation that is subject to natural scepticism. 

We also recognize that AI based solutions must provide decision support, agency and automation to users in executing their PLM functions while being grounded in our customers’ PLM semantics and systemically coherent with pre-season and in-season product lifecycle processes.  Towards this, we have built a Centric AI framework that leverages different forms of AI with pragmatic human-in-the-loop processes to ensure lean practices. 

Ravi Rangan: The foundation of our R&D strategy has always been driven by our customers’ inspirations, challenges and acceptance.  We are customer-centric, this is where our name comes from. We strive to develop configurable and adaptable tools that follow out of the box best practices and proven solutions within a wide range of product categories, business models and regions. Our tools are designed to handle diverse use cases that adapt to unexpected changes brought about by global events like supply-chain disruptions or tariffs. Robustness is a key design consideration at Centric and we achieve it through a mature, data-driven foundation that enhances automation without sacrificing flexibility. Unlike standard out of the box solutions, our tools provide extensive configurability, allowing customers to optimize processes unique to their needs while maintaining low ownership costs. This balance is crucial for managing complex deployments across industries—from fashion to food and home goods—without requiring one-off customizations. Robustness, flexibility and application-level capabilities, more than automation alone, is central to our product’s enduring reliability, scalability and applicability.

Ravi Rangan: The driving force behind Centric’s strategic acquisitions is to bring together best-of-breed application capabilities that reduce the product lifecyle process friction, and to create a unified and highly adaptable platform capable of supporting global, multi-category customers with complex workflows and requirements that span the end-to-end product lifecycle.  And bridge the gaps between traditional silos towards frictionless end-to-end concurrent lifecycle operations. Acquisitions allow Centric to build a cohesive best-of-breed integrated platform that covers a full range of needs—planning, product lifecycle management (PLM), pricing & inventory, market intelligence and beyond—ensuring continuity, consistency, cohesion, and completeness, or "the four Cs," across processes that span critical pre-season, in-season and post season functions. These qualities enable seamless integration and the ability to handle diverse, evolving market trends without compromising on operational efficiency or accuracy.

Ravi Rangan: ​​​​​​​Through our multi-faceted PLM experience over the past three decades, we have observed, implemented, abstracted the generalities and specializations of product data across multiple product types, macro and micro processes, and organization clock-speed dimensions.  This has allowed us to build Centric PLM into the leading Product Lifecycle solution for consumer goods brands, retailers and manufacturers of all sizes — an achievement made possible by our ability to deliver real, tangible ROI such as up to 60% reduction in time to market, 50% increase in productivity and more. These significant positive impacts on clients’ operational efficiency are achieved essentially by breaking down silos, harmonizing data across departments and improving internal and external collaboration through a systemic single source of product data strategy. Centric PLM allows for flexible integration between planning, product lifecycle management (PLM) and pricing, enabling clients to manage diverse product categories—from FMCG discrete products (apparel, footwear, accessories, general merchandise, sports goods, etc.) to formulated goods (food, cosmetics, etc.)—within a unified system. This approach maintains one source of truth for product-specific details while standardizing essential data and ensuring compliance with common processes and product abstractions when appropriate. 

Centric PLM facilitates smooth collaboration between brands, agents, vendors and manufacturers – virtually anyone involved in the product lifecycle from ideation to shelf, allowing data like specs, BOMs and tech packs to be tailored according to each company's needs. Enhanced by Centric Visual Boards™, Centric PLM provides the data foundation needed to enable highly flexible collaboration models. This interoperability streamlines workflows from product conception to launch and beyond, improving time-to-market and reducing operational costs. Finally, Centric PLM’s data integration allows for more sophisticated decision-making by factoring in real-time data on trends, price elasticity, and other metrics, thus enabling smarter, faster decisions that adapt to market dynamics. 

Ravi Rangan: ​​​​​​​Customer feedback has driven Centric Planning's new features by guiding pragmatic and flexible solutions to real-world processes. Centric Software recently unveiled significant updates to Centric Planning, enhancing its analytics and demand forecasting capabilities to help retailers and brands create more accurate assortments. The improved user interface and advanced AI/ML features offer better data visualization and forecasting, while seamless integration with other Centric products like Market Intelligence, PLM, Pricing and Inventory, and Visual Boards provides a comprehensive end-to-end retail planning solution. Key innovations include AI-driven forecasting with advanced algorithms for precise demand predictions, new AI basket analysis for understanding product sales correlations, expanded AI use cases for inventory needs forecasting, and the incorporation of market trends and competitive data into assortment planning. These enhancements aim to boost retail forecasting, consumer-centric decision-making and replenishment capabilities, all within a unified platform, ultimately enabling brands and retailers to make more informed decisions throughout the product lifecycle. 

To allow for varying levels of customer change management and adoption tolerance, Centric has also focused on transparency, explainability and exception human-in-the-loop processing of AI based automation and decision-support recommendations. 

Ravi Rangan: With around 500 customer testimonials on our website, users have reported significant ROI since adopting Centric’s solutions. However, the impact goes beyond purely quantitative metrics, as many operational improvements provide value that cannot be directly measured in numbers. Clients benefit qualitatively by addressing inefficiencies and implementing foundational changes, much like foundational time, cost, quality and customer satisfaction benefits derived from transformative initiatives and business process re-engineering. Centric’s role in ensuring data accuracy, such as institutionalizing and maintaining high levels of BOM accuracy, supports ERP systems that can quantify savings through reduced inventory and ordering errors*, though the impact originates in PLM. This balance of qualitative insights with quantitative validations helps clients recognize ROI, not just in immediate savings but also in sustained operational quality and resilience. 

*ERP systems require BOM accuracy > 99% for a good MRP run. 

Ravi Rangan: To optimize pricing and inventory management, brands and retailers should first recognize the reliability of predictability models and patterns, e.g., classify products as either basic/functional or innovative/seasonal, as each require a unique approach. Basic, predictable products benefit from cost-efficient supply chains, while innovative/seasonal, trend-sensitive products require responsive ones as demand is more unpredictable. Using Centric's product planning, development and sourcing modules, the product-supply chain operational alignment can be strategically planned and defined; through Centric’s planning and forecasting/ price elasticity tools, demand can be tailored accordingly, with simpler models for basic items and advanced, machine-learning models to discern influence factors for more seasonal and trendy ones. This strategic alignment helps clients achieve measurable ROI, with reported sales growth from 6-18% and gross margin improvements between 4-15%. By aligning pricing, demand, and inventory, businesses can ensure optimal stock levels and pricing across all products and stores, adapting seamlessly to market demands.

Ravi Rangan: Centric Software’s solutions not only drive profitability but also support sustainability initiatives by offering tools that address various levels of sustainability goals. Many clients initially use Centric’s solutions to ensure regulatory compliance by tracking product, sourcing and material sustainability metrics at a fine-grain level (e.g., material composition details). However, some sustainable brands go beyond compliance, proactively setting and tracking corporate sustainability targets within product planning and development. Centric’s tools allow companies to prioritize sustainability in their processes—integrating lifecycle assessments, carbon footprint comparisons, and sustainability targets directly into product design and sourcing decisions. We want to support brands at each stage of their sustainability journey per their “design for sustainability” strategy: while some are focused on regulatory compliance, others are paving the way towards building sustainable products at the cost of lower profits as they build and prioritize brand identity based on sustainability with the noble goal of educating and building a discerning consumer base and “saving the planet”.

Ravi Rangan joined Centric as Chief Technology Officer in 2005 through the acquisition of Product Sight Corp., a company he co-founded, and has been involved in several roles at Centric covering new product introduction, and Client Services’ implementation of Centric applications through Centric's Agile Deployment Methodology among others. Ravi has deep experience in PLM technology with PLM deployment experience in multiple industries including Fashion, FMCG - discrete and formulated products, auto/aero, high tech, medical devices, and oil & gas, and has also been involved in academic research and teaching in this domain. Through customer deployments, peer-reviewed conference and journal publications and patents, Ravi has contributed in numerous ways to the field of PLM. He is Past Chair of ASME’s Computers and Information in Engineering Division and is a founding Editorial Board Member of ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering (JCISE). He was elected Fellow of ASME (2011) and inducted into Georgia Tech’s Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni (2008) for his contributions to PLM.