What is Fashion PLM | Top 10 PLM Software for Fashion

Shubham Anil Jain
Sr. Consultant
Cent Edge Solutions LLP, Bangalore, India
Email: [email protected]

What is Fashion PLM?
Fashion PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is a considered as a keystone process for fashion brands. An apparel manufacturing PLM not only assist you to bring products into market, but it also focus to manage the information, actions as well as personnel connected with the entire lifecycle of a product. This basically involves everything from starting of ideation and sourcing at the beginning all the way to the actual production and bringing the product to market. So, overall, the fashion PLM software contributes for steps within the development steps and approval process.

Currently, it is being seen that many fashion businesses worldwide are accepting the best PLM software and systems for fashion and apparel business to increase global visibility and data flow. The main features of Product lifecycle management (PLM) software is that it makes the fashion sector more relevant, smart, and adaptive, as per the experts. If you have a small fashion teams should welcome these technologies as the fashion industry are expanding rapidly. It is seen that with PLM system fashion and apparel companies must gather design, planning, testing, manufacturing, and marketing information, because it offers a central location for efficiently and cost-effectively handling the product lifecycle. To help you select the best PLM software and system for your organization and business, we have summarized some software for you in below article.

Top 10 PLM Software for Fashion and Apparel:
PLM is a specialized software solution that facilitates collaboration, communication, and data management across various stages of product development in fashion and apparel industry. Here is given a list of leading PLM software solutions for the fashion industry.

1. Propel:
This software is special due to its fast response and comes highly recommended by the players in the fashion industry. The crowd-funded Peak Design is considered as one of its trustworthy clients that values its describing product information and product lifecycle management combo. Here, quality management solutions are built into the salesforce platform, which minimizes the time superbly from the concept to customer levels.

2. Centric:
Many experts describes Centric as their fashion PLM software as the first out-of-the-box configured cloud PLM for fashion and consumer products as well as business. The tempt of collaborating with Centric is that you’ll get a well customized solution, the team promises its platform can deal with any business, no matter its needs, without the need for additional coding.

3. Backbone:
It is the best PLM for creating products at a digital speed. It is simply a digital workspace that helps product developers to create, collaborate, and scale. Backbone PLM was developed to meet the requirements of emerging modern DTC brands. Backbone PLM give design teams with all the required tools to develop and share flexible tech packs, which also includes Measurement Spec Sheets, Bill of Materials, and component libraries which can be reused in future tech packs. The system also offers you with impactful reporting tools for line sheets and utilization data.

4. SAP PLM:
It is an on premise and cloud-based PLM software for the use of apparel and fashion industries. It tends to gather all aspects of your business. It also helps to improve the speed of your production as well as the quality of your products. At the same time, it obeys with the regulations of the product lifecycle, thereby improving your company’s profitability. It also helps handle your portfolio from finding the right resources down to minimize time and cost. It also allows real-time calculations to arrive at a cost-relevant report.

5. WFX PLM:
It is best PLM for multi-channel communication, is end-to-end product lifecycle software for the industries like apparel, footwear, accessories, and consumer goods. It helps in easy collaboration among internal teams and suppliers. This PLM software allows businesses to centralize all product development data and offers inbuilt tools to share tech packs, costings, RQFs, Sample Requests, Purchase Orders and many more. It is end-to-end and balances the entire life cycle starting from concept to production. Also, it is seen that its platform, mobile apps, and analytics gives a 360-degree view of product data across your company.

You may also like: Functions of Product Life Cycle Management Software in Apparel Industry

6. Autodesk Vault:
Basically, it is a PLM solution that is a amalgamation of Vault Professional with Fusion 360 Manage. Its product data management characteristics allows you to improve collaboration with your customers, suppliers, and internal team. Due to its centralized data management solution, you can easily track progress, minimize errors, and improve productivity in your fashion and apparel business. It also allows you to develop engineered Bills of Materials that helps to eliminates manual work of your spreadsheets.

7. CGS BlueCherry:
Searching for a PLM specific to the fashion industry and having a integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform? You can go for opting BlueCherry, which is designed “to compete against more sharp fashion and footwear brands,” according to its website. It is simply designed for today’s teams’ flexible, remote work models. Its motto is “Work anywhere, on any device, in any browser”. “There is no requirement to download software or apps. Suitable for SMEs and scalable for global enterprises, BlueCherry is found to be fast, fully-featured, and future proof.”

8. Infor:
Infor is fashion PLM software that has special feature of real-time accurate data for improving visibility and creates the foundation for closer and updated teamwork bringing unity. It helps in the areas of fashion value chain systems in the aspects of line planning, design, and development to supply chain sourcing and in-season consumer-driven design modification.

9. Supply Compass:
It is another important for PLM software for the clothing and fashion companies. Supplier Compass highlights on making the work simple and quick for fashion enterprises to deal with their entire manufacturer network. It provides shared workspaces for product development, communication, and order information to design teams.

10. Visual Next:
As we know that, remote collaboration is one of the latest features that everyone is looking for. Visual Next is a PLM fashion apparel management software that deals to manage complicated product development efficiently and cost-effectively. It’s extraordinary solution-based system that helps to operate remote jobs without any problem.

Conclusion:
To conclude with, seeing the importance and popularity of PLM software, many fashion brands around the world are implementing it, to increase visibility and data flow throughout their organization and the whole supply chain. As per the fashion industry experts, PLM is a solution that makes the industry more relevant, smarter, and adaptable. As the fashion industries are growing and evolving fast, even small fashion enterprises will welcome PLM solutions.

References:

1. Oleksandra Baukh, 27 DEC 2022, Best PLM software for fashion in 2024 https://techpacker.com/blog/design/best-plm-software-for-fashion-in-2023/amp/
2. Sean O’Meara, November 15th 2022, The 17 Best Fashion & Apparel Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Tools https://www.creativeforce.io/blog/17-product-lifecycle-management-solutions-for-smart-fashion-apparel-cf
3. 20 Best PLM Software and Systems for Fashion and Apparel in 2023 https://financesonline.com/best-plm-software-and-systems-for-fashion-and-apparel/
4. Shrestha Brahma, 09/12/2023, How To Choose The Best PLM Fashion Software 2024 https://thefashionfrill.com/fashion/plm-fashion-software/
5. June 2, 2023,The top 10 best fashion software tools for apparel brands https://www.worldfashionexchange.com/blog/the-top-fashion-software-tools-for-apparel-brands/

FAQs:

Q1. Why do we require PLM software?
Ans: PLM software basically helps in mitigating risks through planning in a product’s initial phase itself and design phase and confirms a higher success in later phases of the product lifecycle, for example in product commercialization and go-to-market.

Q2. Is PLM a good career?
Ans: Yes, it is. In current scenario, PLM is one of the areas which is seeing a lot of growth. Therefore, there is a rising demand for experts in the PLM arena.

Q3. Is PLM difficult to learn and handle?
Ans: PLM systems can be sometimes found complex to use and require a certain amount of technical knowledge.

Q4. How to get a job in PLM?
Ans: To acquire job in this, make sure to highlight your skills and experience in PLM, as well as your awards in previous roles. Detail the technologies, coding languages (C#, Python, C++, Java,…) and PLM software (Teamcenter, Enovia, Windchill,…) you’ve used.

Q5. What are PLM students called?
Ans: PLM students and graduates are generally known as PLMayers.

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Founder & Editor of Textile Learner. He is a Textile Consultant, Blogger & Entrepreneur. He is working as a textile consultant in several local and international companies. He is also a contributor of Wikipedia.

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