Integration is about much more than
just IT. Although bridging different
enterprise systems together has its
apparent administrative advantages
such as reducing data errors and
eliminating data duplication, its role
in a modern fashion business is not
confined to just helping back-office
processes run more smoothly.
It is understandable that many brands
and retailers think about integration
this way: their most immediate
challenges likely coincide with
integration’s most immediate benefits.
This is particularly true in cases where
a business has grown quickly and
surpassed the limited capacity of its
pre-existing, disconnected information
environment. In these scenarios,
manual workarounds, and extracting
and re-keying data by hand would
likely have become commonplace
compromises. An integration project
could therefore be seen as a way of
reclaiming valuable time from the
black hole of administrative busywork.
Although streamlining the
administrative flow of data is certainly
one part of the overall picture,
integration is also capable of making
a difference to your company’s bottom
line - at almost every stage of the
product lifecycle.
While the existence of system-to-system integration is
far from new, the fashion industry’s rapid adoption
of CAD, patternmaking, PLM, ERP, and other solutions has
brought about a wave of new opportunities and challenges.
Spurred by competition to invest in a broader range of
process-specific solutions, brands and retailers are using
these technologies to enable different teams to respond more
quickly to changing market trends. The danger, however, is
that these efforts may backfire if departments are unable
to share and access the same pool of information.
This issue has been much debated among senior retail
executives for decades, who have finally concluded that
communal access to information has the potential to
transform businesses far beyond the individual process
level. Writing in the Harvard Business Review more
than twenty years ago, Bob L. Martin (the then-CEO of
Walmart’s International Division) said:
“For [any] global company, the ability to take information
from multiple systems and make it broadly accessible to
managers and employees is critical. […] Today technology
plays a role in almost everything we do, from every aspect
of customer service to customizing our store formats
or matching our merchandising strategies to individual
markets to meet varied customer preferences.”
While retail is a broad field, the core tenets of store
planning, merchandising, marketing, and mapping the
customer journey will be familiar to fashion businesses of
any shape and size. More often than not, these very same
businesses will now have deployed different solutions to
facilitate each of these processes. And as Martin predicted
in 1995, true business value for employees and executives
alike can be created from an information environment in
which all of these different systems work in unison.
Functionally speaking, integrating
two systems – whether they are
small-point solutions or enterprisewide
products like PLM - involves
establishing a form of information
interchange that allows data from
chosen fields in one application to
automatically populate related fields in
another without manual intervention.
From these essential building blocks,
complex interactions between design
and development, and seamless
workflows from product development
to sourcing can be created.
The method of integration can be
bespoke (a script coded by hand, inhouse,
using either open or proprietary
interfaces), or commercialized,
where the vendor of one product
sells a ready-built interface between
their solution and one or more
popular third-party products.
Although open, transparent interfaces
– referred to as Application Protocol
Interfaces, or APIs – are rapidly
becoming the norm, documentation
for these (which enables third parties
to easily integrate their existing
solutions with, or add functionality
to an application) is targeted at
developers rather than designers.
This is why even the most common
integration in fashion, between Adobe
Illustrator and PLM, was created
by forward-thinking vendors rather
than the employees actually using
the tools – because even the most
transparent methods of integration
are not necessarily user-friendly.
Ensuring the flow of information from one system to
another – from CAD to PLM and vice versa, for instance
– is just one of the basic functions of integration. Integration
is about more than just bridging applications through
data interfaces. The aim is to create links between the
different disciplines of product design, development and preproduction,
and to deliver compounded benefits by doing so.
For example, bi-directional integration between CAD
and PLM not only ensures consistency of the data
pertaining to individual styles, but also improves the
entire lifecycles of the products themselves by preserving
design integrity and communicating important metadata
from the flat-sketch stage to the point of manufacture and
marketing. In addition, truly best-in-class CAD to PLM
integration allows creative teams, through single-sign-on
functionality and intelligent automation, to create,
upload, and seamlessly reuse components, color palettes,
materials and more - eliminating administrative overhead
and liberating creative time in one fell swoop.
Moving on from CAD, these same principles extend
to virtually any aspect of creative design and product
development, where the same ability to nurture inspiration
and power collaboration through data integrity can deliver
compounded benefits. Without integration, useful (and even
essential) data lives only in the system that generated it,
and is accessible only to those working with that individual
solution. Color profiles, for example, can only be found in
color-management tools unless those tools are integrated
into PLM. Grading rules will remain in patternmaking
solutions, and so on. When fully exploited, each of these data
sets has utility far beyond the point of creation.
Material information, to highlight a further example, is
not only essential during design and product development,
but also holds considerable worth in sourcing, sampling,
fitting, quality assurance and marketing. This includes
color information, weight, drape, durability and a range
of other data points. Without integration, these material
characteristics – usually entered during the early stages
of a product’s lifecycle - are typically left in a disconnected
solution, and their value is limited. An integrated information
environment, on the other hand, allows greater value to be
extracted from that contiguous thread of data at various
stages of the product lifecycle.
The purpose of integration should be thought of as twofold: it
can secure essential product data by preventing it from being
lost or corrupted and at the same time, it can add to that
same data’s inherent value. In our example of CAD to PLM
integration, people can only see the true value of the data
held in Adobe Illustrator files by connecting design with the
other business-critical activities it influences. These include
costing, sourcing, fitting, ensuring sustainability, managing
suppliers, and more.
And the same principles of accessibility
and consistency can be applied to
anyone, anywhere who contributes to
a product’s lifecycle in any way. The
information they receive and generate
is of greater value because it is visible,
accurate, and actionable at other stages
of design, development and production.
From a whole-business perspective, it
now becomes clearer how integration
– that continuous thread of common
data – can deliver value in concrete
terms, and beyond the immediate
impact of easing the administrative
burden. The modern, omni-channel,
fashion marketplace is evolving more
rapidly than even its keenest analysts
can track, and brands and retailers are
struggling with the increased speed
of consumer demand and changing
trends. Lead time for many brands and
retailers, on the other hand, remain
long, and the most common target in
the adoption of technology in fashion
is the ability to react instantly to new
trends as they emerge.
But this kind of reactivity is not
something any brand or retailer
can expect a single department or
individual process to achieve. Even
with the best 2D and 3D CAD tools,
the creative design process can only
operate so quickly; and despite moves
towards proximity sourcing, there
is a hard limit on how quickly those
designs can be made and shipped to
retail markets. The most significant
gains in lead time have come from other
disciplines across the extended supply
chain, working in unison to optimize
the product lifecycle.
A business that prioritizes the value
of the common thread that is data,
configuring its integrated information
around it – may be able to shave
weeks or even months off its lead
time, depending on complexity and
product category.
From an executive perspective, with a bird’s-eye view
on all these different disciplines, departments and
stakeholders, fashion is a uniquely complex industry.
Multinational supply chains and omni-channel retail
distribution networks are standard and seasonal, geographic
and size variability generate both huge numbers of
SKUs (stock keeping units) and incredibly complicated
product development and distribution processes. Without
integration, this complexity creates more blind spots when it
comes to transparency, visibility, and the ability to respond
to change, than it does in perhaps any other industry.
But as a result, the fragmented nature of the fashion industry
means that it stands to benefit more than other industries
from establishing a consistent, contemporaneous thread of
data that links essential processes and carries through every
iteration and variation from design to delivery.
This does not mean, however, that every conceivable
data point should be integrated with a common
backbone, and while an I.T. professional may be better
equipped to visualize where data sets are separated,
executives have a unique vantage point when it comes to
charting the opportunities for linking different cultures,
and bridging the right divides to enable better-informed
decision-making.
We have already written about the benefits of bringing
CAD and PLM together, but it is important to remember
that creative tools serve a variety of different purposes
beyond drawing. Despite the popularity of Adobe
Creative Suite, different solutions exist for twodimensional
and three-dimensional design, and designers,
patternmakers, and garment technicians work with
a huge variety of knitting, weaving, print design and
color-management tools. Integrating all these processes
together can help creative teams collaborate better
and create stylistically unique collections under tight
time constraints.
Beyond design tools, further common points of integration
that can deliver whole-business benefits include: manufacturing
hardware (cutters, spreaders, and plotters) with
native file support shared with CAD and PLM; merchandise
planning solutions that draw business intelligence from
previous years’ sales performance; supplier management
ranking tables that can be directly linked to sustainability
indexes and auditing tools; and collection management
and marketing modules that leverage metadata created
during the earliest stages of inspiration.
Many of these points of integration have already delivered
value for brands and retailers:
- Links between patternmaking solutions and PLM have
delivered greater accuracy in bills of materials;
- Detailed material characteristics made available
beyond the point of creative design have improved
communication with mills, manufacturers, and trim
and packaging suppliers, allowing sourcing managers
to negotiate better pricing based on sound business
intelligence;
- Three-dimensional prototypes and virtual samples,
created with 3D CAD tools and made available to view
within PLM, have dramatically decreased the cost of
sample creation and logistics;
- Successful integrations of design and development
solutions with sourcing and supplier management
systems have given rise to a “design-to-cost” approach,
where creative teams are able to visualize the bill-ofmaterial
and bill-of-labor impact of their decisions.
This allows for more accurate pricing, reduced
lead times, more effective production, and better
positioning across international markets;
- CAD to PLM integration, with in-application access
to components, materials, and other libraries stored
within PLM, has afforded designers more time to
experiment, and resulted in greater style variety
within collections, as well as helping them to reach
markets more quickly;
- Integrating PLM with ERP – the two pillars of most
information environments – can provide a more
holistic view of products and collections, with retail
performance reports informing the styles, colors,
fits and prices of future collections. Keeping data
consistent from the inspiration stage to the final
production stages allows marketing and retail teams
to better tailor collections to their target audiences.
These levels of integration, however, can be difficult or
expensive to achieve when working across different
ecosystems, where data formats, inputs, outputs, and
interfaces vary widely. Many brands and retailers find
considerable value in working with a vendor who offers
standardized data interchange between their own design
tools, patternmaking products, and PLM, avoiding the need
to develop potentially costly, bespoke integrations between
different families of solutions.
Whoever modern brands and retailers choose to obtain their
software from, integration should not be considered just a
matter of linking one technology to another, but rather an
opportunity to create an information environment that aligns
with whole-business goals whilst simultaneously improving
the user experience, collaboration, and other important
metrics at the individual process level.