Calendar Management in FlexPLM

New Product Introduction (NPI) is the term used to describe the complete process of bringing a new product to market. In today's world companies need to respond to trends more effectively, quickly and efficiently. It is very important for any company to reduce time-to-market from concept to consumer to stay ahead of the competition globally.

Calendar management is a primary challenge for retail, footwear & apparel (RFA) companies. The challenge arises due to the complex nature of the apparel and retail value chain, and the rapid time to market demands that exist to bring the latest trends to market.

In the collaborative product development process; multiple designers, technical designers, merchandisers, material developers and sourcing managers work on different aspects of the product development process spread across the GLOBE. There are many tasks, milestones and approvals that need to take place among a global product development team, across multiple processes. There has always been a demand for a solution that provides all of these complex functionalities.

Calendar Management is a way to view high level progress of product development against key milestones via a global PLM platform. It is also a means to look at where the product development process is slow today, and where improvements need to be made – beginning with product conceptualization through final delivery of the product to the retail channel. It also gives access for the company TOP MANAGEMENT to look at the product development statuses.

FlexPLM, the web-based enterprise PLM tool for Retail, Footwear and Apparel companies provides the calendar management solution for the new product development. It has following capabilities:

• Define seasonal calendars, including key product development milestones
• Track progress of individual products against the seasonal calendar.
• Track progress of individual SKU's(Colorways) against the seasonal calendar.
• Dashboard Report of all the Products in a Season showing current status of ALL Products and SKU's.
• Different color indicator for the on time, completed early and late running Products.

I look at FlexPLM having below gaps with respect to calendar management:

• The calendar association with Product and SKU's should be automated through configuration settings. More often companies would want to associate the same calendar as of Season to it's Line Products and SKU's.
• The proven Workflow solution in FlexPLM automates the business process. But the calendar and Workflow needs a real-time integration. When a user completes his/her Workflow tasks the corresponding calendar milestone should be completed automatically. This will definitely help the global team moving forward to achieve the in-store date.
• There is a need for automation of product and SKU status changes based on the calendar milestone completions. When a milestone is completed, system with configuration settings should change the product and sku statuses accordingly.
• Ability to filter the Products and SKU's based on search criteria on Calendar Dashboard. In case of a Season having approx 10K products and 30K SKU's (some customers already have) it is very difficult to go and find the specific product of the long list.

Lastly I would say we need a solution that caters to the global PLM stakeholders to manage approvals, change the product status, complete the milestone and tasks and view the calendar dashboard on the GO on their SMART PHONES either at the Starbucks with a coffee or at the airport while travelling.