What next for PLM?

That said, these decisions need to be taken with care – with the cost of responding to big data intelligence being taken into account, says Mike Flanagan, CEO of Clothesource. “A typical 40,000-SKU [stock-keeping unit] store would probably spend more in staff time restocking every product big data ‘predicts’ will sell than it would ever get back in margin if it did.”

Also, while big data might be able highlight repeating market patterns – like what sells best on what days and in what kind of weather – for products that last a long time, like wine or books, “in clothing, of course, big data can’t do any of this because few garments these days stay on sale for as long as eight weeks,” Flanagan adds. So data-inspired sales opportunities may be limited.

However, Leith asserts that PLM can help drive value in businesses through data analytics, specifically around demand optimisation and trend prediction, ensuring that brand owners are tracking and predicting trends and allowing the analytics to dictate their design, supply and manufacturing processes.

“Introducing techniques like sentiment analysis can also help smart brand owners test products in the market without fully committing to costly production runs,” he says.

To maximise PLM potential, experts stress the value of evolving how senior figures across a clothing brand interact with such platforms. “Senior management will be evaluated on the performance of their supply chain,” suggests Burstein. “As we are seeing in the industry, more and more C-level executives have supply chain experience. This trend will continue.”

Of course, marketing and sales are important in generating demand, but if supply cannot be delivered swiftly and cost-effectively, revenue and profit can quickly decline.

Leith adds that PLM’s delivery of customer feedback will give senior management direct insight into new trends and how to meet them, allowing them to easily identify opportunities not only for efficiency gain but keeping customers satisfied.

Burstein says that large clothing brands need to take a thorough and methodical approach when incorporating increasingly sophisticated PLM systems into their businesses. And while this is sensible, in the short term it can hand an advantage to smaller operators.

“Large, mature organisations need to take it one step at a time and change their processes and culture in phases,” he stresses and, as a result, a new breed of companies may emerge to lead in new retail solutions, just as Amazon has done.

Leith believes that PLM systems will evolve to operate automatically, and that already the “automation of various processes through smart solutions has increased user efficiency and allowed those users to focus more on the customer and products they sell,” passing more day-to-day activities to the system.

Which is all good – but who pays for the investment? Flanagan emphasises that clothing businesses face growing challenges around the cost of implementing increasingly sophisticated platforms such as PLM. “One rarely acknowledged part of the current retail crisis is that retailers’ bright ideas are rarely supplier funded any more,” he notes.

To illustrate, he points to the case of a clothing supplier complaining to him how his costs had doubled over the past five years, but his Western customers still wanted lower prices. Flanagan explains the company was “reluctant to fund his Western customers’ flirtation with technologies whose profitability to the supplier wasn’t immediately apparent.”

However, both Burstein and Leith assert that the potential ROI (return on investment) on sophisticated PLM platforms outweighs concerns about cost.

“Cost is always an issue, but the ROI on supply chain platforms will be enormous. They will also become a requirement to compete effectively,” argues Burstein.

And as for Leith, he says: “For smaller brands cost is always a sensitive matter but the reality is that brands that do not evolve and adopt solutions that make them more efficient, more engaged with their customers, will fall behind. The cost of remaining on manual, Excel-based processes could ultimately outweigh the cost of a robust PLM solution.”