GERBER TECHNOLOGY INSIGHT

Product Lifecycle Management for The Business of Fashion

www.gerbertechnology.com

Table of Contents
The New Look for the Business of Fashion ...........................................................................................2 Product Lifecycle Management Helps Fashion Flourish .......................................................................3 The Fashion Industry's Unique PLM Needs ...........................................................................................4 Real-Life Fashion-Focused Solutions ......................................................................................................5 Integration of CAD/PDM/PLM Critical for Fashion Industry ................................................................6 Full CAD and PDM Integration ..............................................................................................................8 Modular PLM Solution ...........................................................................................................................9 Gerber Technology Professional Services Facilitate Global PLM .......................................................11

The New Look for the Business of Fashion

Today, the business of fashion is won or lost in supply chain efficiency.

only stay ahead of fashion trends, but also create longer enough; the industry demands continuous customer-need." effectively than ever.

Fashion apparel and goods designers must not Speed-to-market is no

and manage goods more quickly and cost-

process improvement that enables "speed-toBrand owners face an environment where they must have new merchandise as frequently as possible to satisfy fickle, trend-driven consumers with "want-it-new, "want-it-now" mentality. Fashion seasons have increased from four to eight or more per year, with some retailers bringing new merchandise to stores almost every week. Ideally, fashion companies want to capture point-of-sale data in real-time and communicate new design concepts "onthe-fly" to meet customer demand. The ability to react to what's selling and adapt accordingly has become key to staying at the forefront of the fashion industry. At the same time, fashion labels must ensure quality and consistency of fit in their designs to enhance and maintain brand reputation and customer satisfaction. When concept-to-sale cycles are accelerated, the efficiency of the supply chain becomes increasingly important. Most fashion companies and their suppliers are spread around the world. Often, they're leveraging multiple vendors for the same garment style.

The combination of managing time, costs, geographic location and multiple vendors makes the management and quality control of the apparel value chain increasingly complex. As complexity increases and participants in the apparel value chain spread globally, shared visibility is critical. Without it, efficiency is lost and redundancy increases as the streamlining of systematic and repeatable processes from design to execution are harder to implement and maintain. Often, vendors implement their own best practices, but information cannot be not shared throughout the supply chain because it is not integrated. Without secure shared visibility for all apparel value chain participants, it is difficult for fashion companies to readily improve upon existing processes and enable an agile and high-performing supply chain. With these market realities and rapid product lifecycles, real-time supply chain visibility, efficient logistics and effective collaboration have risen to paramount importance for fashion business performance and competitiveness. Fashion companies understand they must have better collaboration between all parties -- and management visibility into the entire product lifecycle process -to meet customer demand, remain competitive and maximize profitability. To address these issues, fashion companies are becoming more adept at Product Data Management (PDM) and are implementing more comprehensive and collaborative Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technology solutions.

Product Lifecycle Management Helps Fashion Flourish

By improving management of the product lifecycle, companies can enable real-time collaboration, ensure process execution and garner actionable information. PLM increases responsiveness and flexibility to manage specification and schedule changes so that companies can eliminate tasks that fail to add value. For example, when a technical designer or product manager leverages PLM technology to request a sample, an alert is automatically generated to the responsible vendors vendors to-do list. The technical designer no longer has to remember to send a separate email to notify the vendor that a sample has been requested.

Real-time availability of actionable information reduces time-to-market and increases competitive advantage. With better management visibility into the process, fashion companies will know, in real-time, the answers to key questions such as:
What percentage of styles have been released to sourcing for any given season? What fit samples are left to be approved for a specific season? How did this affect the development cycle (i.e. where is the bottleneck)? How can we improve the process next time by reviewing supply exception reporting to see what's late in the development cycle?

However, while general concepts on product lifecycle management hold true from industry to industry, the approaches and capabilities of PLM solutions can vary a great deal. The fashion industry differs in many ways from other types of discrete manufacturing (such as automotive, aerospace, food and pharmaceutical). By recognizing the differences between vendor offerings, fashion companies can best choose PLM solutions that address their unique company needs and industry issues.

The Fashion Industry's Unique PLM Needs

The fashion industry's product lifecycle management process is, by nature, very visual, collaborative and intensive. Some manufacturing environments may have few items and long development cycles, while fashion has hundreds of items and rapid development cycles. Fashion companies require real-time visibility into multiple collections (by season, or group, or year) and a multi-dimensional bill of materials to interact with vendors. Fashion requires hundreds of simultaneous prototypes, versus serial prototyping more common to other industries. This makes it much more complicated to efficiently manage the product lifecycle. It is not a process that can be effectively managed with a spreadsheet and email. Another key difference is that the apparel supply chain participants and their information needs are different than those of other industries. Most discrete manufacturing is typically comprised of engineers and scientists sharing data in which aesthetics is not the primary component of the process. However, in fashion, supply chain participants are merchandisers and designers sharing not only data but images (that must show critical accuracy on color, fabric, drape, and fit) in which aesthetics is a critical part of the process. This means PLM solutions must be userfriendly and configurable instead of programmable. They must capture the data at the source and offer visual imaging at many points in the process. To do this, the industry requires a PLM solution that has a full-featured enterprise workflow engine to achieve effective collaboration between brand owners and vendors. A full-featured enterprise workflow system provides process visibility and calendaring and allows companies to manage by exception, generate alerts, and perform "what-if" scenarios.

Real-Life Fashion-Focused Solutions

Founded in 1968, Gerber Technology has the largest PDM installed base and is the world's leading supplier of automated CAD/CAM/PLM and hardware solutions for the apparel and fashion materials industry. The company has pioneered software and hardware tools for fashion for more than 40 years and has a broad base of customers and proven technology innovation. It created the concept of Computer

Aided Design (CAD) for fashion and was first to offer PDM for CAD in the fashion industry. Drawing upon its in-depth market knowledge and leadership, Gerber Technology created a product lifecycle management solution specifically designed for the fashion industry and aligned with companies where a focus on continuous improvement is a cultural norm.

Gerber Technology provides Fashion Lifecycle Management (FLM), a solution that spans the product design and development (PD&D) cycle -- from concept to purchase order. Gerber Technology's solution is unique in that it enables continuous process improvement so that companies can reap the benefits of PLM with the flexibility to add capabilities as their needs evolve. By simplifying and shortening the implementation period, Gerber Technology's approach saves time, resources and cost. It allows companies to establish key business processes, prepare data internally, and bring employees up to speed before rolling a system out to their supply chain.

Gerber Technology's FLM solution allows companies to:

Embrace PLM at the right pace with a suite of modular functionality: Unlike competitive offerings that can be monolithic "one-size-fits-all" propositions, Gerber Technology's customers can immediately take advantage of new functionality, choosing what they want, when they want it, based on their own business plan and business processes.

Adapt PLM implementation to their unique needs: Gerber Technology software allows customers to take advantage of new features and functions, build upon experience, and improve the processes already in place while obtaining incremental improvements based on customer feedback.

Protect and extend their software investment: With Gerber Technology, companies can extend their existing investment in software, training, data and processes. They do not have to replace everything and start from scratch.

Gerber Technology's Fashion Lifecycle Management solution offers a collaborative suite of capabilities, complete workflow environment and fully integrated process components. From a design standpoint, Gerber Technology's FLM solution allows companies to: Coordinate processes with all departments, vendors and buyers and enable individuals to work in tandem. Provide a "single version of the truth" throughout the global supply chain. Reduce costs by minimizing waste and redundancy. Speed development. Maximize available resources. Provide real-time status on key processes. Extend product design monitoring through production to delivery at distribution center. Provide management visibility throughout the value chain. Facilitate continuous process improvement.

Integration of CAD/PDM/PLM Critical for Fashion Industry

When fashion companies are looking for a PLM solution, a key consideration should be the extent to which that solution's CAD and PLM products can be integrated. The typical fashion product lifecycle requires data entry by several different departments within the company -- as well as several different suppliers and manufacturers. The importance of accuracy of information to create a "single version of the truth" and achieve effective collaboration between all parties is critical. Instantaneous and accurate information flow between CAD, PDM and PLM speeds the development process, reduces costs, avoids errors in production and maintains consistency in quality and fit. There is tremendous business value of fully integrated CAD and PLM. Often times, companies choose a CAD product based on the particular needs of one department, and choose a PLM product based on the requirements of another -- without realizing the inherent benefit to integrating them. There are significant business benefits to taking a holistic, synergistic and strategic organizational approach to buying decisions. By seizing opportunities for cross-functional synergies in business processes and integrating systems, fashion companies maximize efficiencies and overall profitability.

Through collaboration, brand owners and manufacturers will make revisions to patterns and will want those changes seamlessly and quickly communicated to all parties in the process. fabric, grading, etc.) that must be shared with manufacturers for costing, the creation of samples and ultimately, production. In order Each pattern includes an enormous amount of technical information (such as the amount of

to ensure accurate and consistent fit from diverse suppliers in an array of global locations, one set of properly engineered and balanced blocks or patterns must be provided and consistently utilized. Marker visibility in the development and sourcing process is important

for reducing waste and improving fabric utilization. If CAD is not integrated, revised information must be exported and manually attached to the technical specifications each time a change is made. Additionally, this manual approach does not easily support the high level of detail and accuracy needed for manufacturers to execute precisely. Without integrated CAD, the process is not only cumbersome and time-consuming, but it also increases the chances of error in the exchange of information.

In fashion, speed-to-market is critical, and mistakes are costly.

Gerber understands the importance of having a fashion company's CAD system very well integrated with PDM to facilitate product lifecycle management. Gerber Technology's AccuMark CAD product and WebPDM Product Data Management products work together in a fully integrated manner, permitting customers to improve data utilization and automatically transfer data. When a pattern, model, or marker is changed in AccuMark, the revised information is automatically updated within Gerber's WebPDM product, because both products share the same data source. By taking advantage of the integration between AccuMark and WebPDM, Gerber Technology customers quickly and accurately create Marker Usage Sheets and detailed Pattern Sheets (or Cutter's Musts) that leave no chance for misinterpretation or error.

Full CAD and PDM Integration

What sets Gerber Technology apart is the full integration it offers between its CAD and PDM products. There is a substantial difference between standard and full integration so it's important for fashion companies to understand the extent to which the CAD and PDM products in a PLM solution are integrated. Integration does not need to be tedious or require custom software development.

AccuMark and WebPDM products can be fully integrated to include the sharing of pattern data marker information and images, including items such as: Names, quantities and images of pattern pieces Pattern area and notches Cutting distance or perimeter required for each pattern piece Material utilization or efficiency of markers, and a reference image for the marker

Full integration provides a much deeper level of detail than standard integration and enables better collaboration, planning and costing between all parties in the product development lifecycle. With tight integration between CAD and PDM technologies, fashion companies are better able to manage their global supply chain, achieve better quality and more consistent fit in the finished product.

Gerber Technology's Modular PLM Solution

Gerber Technology's Fashion Lifecycle Management solution consists of three functional layers that include design tools, product data management, and information collaboration tools. It allows companies to start with any program and add capabilities as the organization adapts and business needs change. This evolutionary architecture approach protects and extends a company's software and training investments without massive re-engineering or unforeseen consequences as system's capabilities expand. FLM components and modular functionality enable effective, real-time collaboration with the global supply chain.

Design Tools:

At the core of the FLM model is the design process itself. The Design Tool layer contains the software that can be used for conceptual development (such as Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw), pattern development (Gerber Technology's AccuMark PDS), grading and marking (AccuMark GMS), marking (AccuNest), and three-dimensional prototyping (V-Stitcher).

WebPDM for FLM maintains all component libraries that contain technical specifications, color management, multidimensional Bills of Materials (BOM) and costing. It also manages line assortment and a variety of image types, data, and reporting capabilities. Gerber Technology's WebPDM offers seamless FLM integration.

The Product Data Management layer captures information and adds to it the requirements to manufacture the designs. Then, it catalogs the design layer information for use by all other departments. WebPDM for FLM is the latest evolution of Gerber Technology's WebPDM, the leading and proven Web-based PDM software available for fashion. It allows users to control materials, specifications, costing and sourcing requirements, image management, workflow and more. It enables users to share essential visual details, such as precise measurements and three-dimensional graphics, so that teams can see the finished results more cost effectively and with fewer samples.

Product Data Management:

Information Collaboration Tools:

The Information Collaboration Tools disseminate data from the Product Data Management system throughout the global supply chain and enable a globally collaborative framework. This layer of Gerber Technology's solution includes critical programs such as robust Workflow, Sample Tracking, Partner Licensing and Integration tools that enable the multidirectional flow of information to retailers, brand developers, suppliers and factories that need to interact with the data.

Programs in the Information Collaboration layer include:

FLM Workflow: Coordinate scheduling and enable communication for all lifecycle processes. Visibility and analytic tools (such as graphical dashboards and exception reporting) provide managers with real-time data on how well the product is progressing, relative to goals. FLM Workflow automatically generates time-and-action calendars from WebPDM's collection, fabric or style folders. Tasks appear in the "to-do" list, based on the role to which they are assigned and can be prioritized, based on due dates or business conditions. Users can control access to information, based on roles.

FLM Interface Tools: Eliminate data "silos" or redundant entry of data in other business systems. These tools can be used to import or export various information, including raw materials, approved vendors, and validation lists from an ERP system into WebPDM -- or vice versa.

FLM Vendor Collaboration: Enable remote, browser-based collaboration with global supply chain partners. Partners can view, edit or print product specifications in a secure environment. Role-based access control allows brand owners the ability to limit what partners can see or edit to protect private information and maintain control of the process.

FLM Request Tracker: Coordinate detail level request and tracking across the supply chain. Users can collaborate on requests from multiple vendors -- including fit samples, fabric samples, lab dips and trim. Configured to unique business needs, Request Tracker provides tracking of any number of attribute fields, including airway bill numbers, ship dates, approvals and costs (which can be formula-driven). It provides real-time "at-a-glance" status of all requests, by any configurable field, and provides selectable requestand-attribute security to protect proprietary information among vendors.

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These three functional layers enable companies to take a phased approach to PLM implementation. Once business goals and technology needs are determined, that information is used to create a plan. From there, companies can begin to implement or augment FLM design and specification tools. When companies have their data organized internally, they can move from product data management to

product lifecycle management. In this phase, companies can propagate, collaborate and monitor product design information and specifications -both internally and externally. Finally, companies can analyze results and improve processes to achieve full fashion lifecycle management -- from design to consumer.

Gerber Technology Professional Services Facilitate Global PLM

With Gerber Technology's FLM solution, fashion companies can optimize product management, shorten development cycles, reduce costs and training services to ensure customer satisfaction. With regional offices, agents and distributors in over 125 countries and 16 Customer Solutions Centers on six continents, Gerber Technology offers unrivaled support for global customers. As the market leader with in-depth market expertise, Gerber Technology is the only provider that can readily address the unique PLM needs of global fashion companies.

improve efficiencies. To facilitate implementation, Gerber Technology provides assistance to companies worldwide through an extensive network of fashion industry-savvy professionals. These fashion industry experts provide consulting, development and implementation assistance, as well as educational and

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Corporate Headquarters Gerber Technology 24 Industrial Park Road West Tolland, CT 06084, USA Phone: +1 860 871-8082

www.gerbertechnology.com July 2008