Fashion, Apparel, and Footwear Companies Leveraging PLM

Aberdeen Group's benchmark report "PLM for the Fashion, Apparel, and Footwear Industries: Enabling Speed and Responsiveness, Delivering Higher Profitability" finds that the fashion, apparel, and footwear industry faces intense pressure from demanding deadlines, constant change orders, and complex global supply chains. To address this, Aberdeen reports that the Best-in-Class apparel and footwear companies are 54% more likely than Industry Average to have an integrated Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) implementation in place. Manufacturers are using this technology to manage the rapid response times and short product lifecycles that are a reality in the fashion, apparel, and footwear market.

"Apparel and footwear manufacturers with mature PLM implementations are seeing improvements in key performance metrics, including higher sell-through on products and increased percentage of full price sales, in additon to reacting more quickly to customer preference changes and minimizing the number of chargebacks due to quality issues," says Jim Brown, VP of Product Innovation & Engineering Research. "Of apparel companies that have had PLM implementations for longer than one year, 65% are seeing YOY revenue growth."