After bedding manufacturer American Textile Company (Sealy, Tempur-Pedic, etc.) expanded its single, local production facility to a multi-continent, global supply chain, it faced a hard truth: its beloved Excel spreadsheets, pdfs and Word documents weren’t cutting it. In fact, they were slowing down development and sourcing efforts. Today, the 99-year-old, privately held, family-owned company is a success story for digital transformation and change management.
In the panel “Local to Global: Building an American Powerhouse,” Nancy Zimmerman, vice president & head of product development, American Textile, sat down with Trevor Bremner, sales director, North America, Centric Software, and Sarah Jones, senior editor, strategic content, Sourcing Journal, to explain how they did it.
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“We had reached the limitations with our suite of Microsoft Office products,” said Zimmerman. “We implemented Centric [PLM] two years ago and that has really allowed us to both diversify our supply chain [and] get to market faster. We have a single source of truth. We’re providing our tech packs to our suppliers in a more robust way, and it helps us internally as we are trying to manage and measure our business better and also as we’re looking to build more robust relational versus transactional relationships with our supply chain.”
While American Textile deals with bedding, Centric’s Bremner says the pain points that apparel and footwear companies have are all the same, and they can only be managed with a single source of truth.
“It comes down to a lot of collaboration…being able to work on the same projects, the same documents, and being able to work with your suppliers and your vendors overseas or locally, to have them in the same system through a portal to manage bill of materials, tech packs, quotes and everything in the same system,” said Bremner.
Failure to do so amid complex supply chains will increase bottlenecks, inefficiencies and costs, he warned, and failure to embrace a digital system “will slow your whole process of getting product out the door and into the market.”
Centric goes beyond product lifestyle management to include everything from merchandise financial planning to artificial intelligence for design inspiration and market intelligence for pricing help. It’s all about getting product right and getting it into consumer’s hands quickly.