Retail and Fashion Merchandising

  

        Merchandising means the process of buying and selling of goods. For a footwear and apparel industry it spans across the process which analyses and even forecasts the customer's demand and make customer's buy what they want to sell via efficient product marketing. This involves knowing the present and future fashion trends. What is hot and what is going to be hot. Innovation is the key, but also the customer's spending capacity needs to be considered . Communication between the merchandizers and the marketing is the key for efficient merchandising processes.

        Does FlexPLM as a process and data management tool cater to this need of efficient communication. I don't think so.I don't know if there is any software which does this. There needs to be a channel for communication between the fashion merchandizers, marketing team and the product designers so that the creative ideas to be trapped. Fashion Merchandizers are people who creatively display the products in the retail stores and are the people to see the customer's first hand response for the product. For the newly initiated products it could make a great difference if the customer's product response is recorded as early as possible and required changes/enhancements are made. A good idea could be a mobile app for the in store merchandizer to record customer responses in the real time and send it across to the PLM systems and the marketing team.

        For the newly initiated products, the placement of the product in the store also makes a lot of difference. The merchandizers should be creative enough to place the NIP (New Initiated product) to attract customer attention. And if possible there can be a tracking device as well which could do this. A camera scanner may be !

      Social networking and mobility is changing the way companies are selling their goods. Creating facebook/twitter fan group for a product also helps in capturing customer response.Product performance tracking becomes easier with online selling channel which includes mobile commerce. This implies the need for any enterprise application to extend itself across all channels.

Related articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_merchandising

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.

Determining User Access previleges in FlexPLM

The implementation had 120 different user groups and more than 2000 users in the Flex System. Now if someone randomly asks for the do's and dont's a specific user can do in the system. Who belongs to 20 different groups. Its going to be a headache. Since , the documentation containing the security matrix was out of sync with the actualy roles and groups present in the system. It took more than an hour to determine the all the previleges given to a particular user.

  The system should have a user access report. Which tells which flexTypes can the user create , delete and edit.

Reducing the Type manager import time

Flex PLM  provides the flexibility to export the complete type manager or one node at a time. If you have around 30000 attributes defined in the system , then the best practice is to import the type manager type by type and not try to load it completely at a single stretch . Since , the type manager loader does not load in incremental commits. If the loader fails at line 29000 , it rolls back everything , and you have to start fresh.

   Maybe it would have been better if , after every type is loaded , a commit is been done and a restart point is created, so that the second time , when the type manager is imported , it does not start from the begining.

    Also , if it take 2 hours to load data upto line 20000 , it stops and does not tell is there is an issue at line 20001 as well .

  The second  methodology can be that , when the file is loaded , before loading , the type manage loader program should list out all the errors in advance. So that , the user can go and rectify all the errors and then load the type manager. At least he will save a lot of time.

Messed up Cluster Setup

Day 0:Thats it , development is freezing from today and from tommorrow , IT testing is going to start and on the actual clustered flexPLM system. Everyone, get ready from tommorrow , as we need to do IT testing. The test lead will distribute the test scripts to you guys, All the best.

Day 1:
Tester:  the test server is not up and running since the system admin did some mistakes to install FlexPLM system on a clustered environment.  we have the test scripts, but do not have a system.

Manager: We are talking to the sys admin and the issue will be resolved , he has a back up of all the servers.

Day 2: Tester: Is the system up and running today ?

 Manager: No still, we tried to restore the server on a single server mode , but its not working may be some changes in the property file.

 Day 3 : Still the test system is not up and running.

The point is , is it difficult to switch from server running 1 master and 3 slaves to just one master. I think in a clustered environments , slaves can be turned off at any time  . Slaves are to support the master. All the 4 systems use the same database and can be run standalone, but why is it difficult to restore a cluster.

 First of all , is there a procedure to back up a clustered FlexPLM system ? How do you rehost a clustered FlexPLM system ?  

FlexPLM Data Loaders

An developer who has worked with XML will definitely loath working on the way the object loaders work in the FlexPLM system. I mean, i had to create a 200 attribute long mapping list for all my attributes first. What the heck. and everytime i need to check the position . I am waiting , if the future releases , a flexObject will be in a form of an XML document rather than the pain old hashmap .

Also , it would be nice if we could use an XML mapping document rather than a tilde (~ )delimited flat file .

XML is so developer friendly.

FlexPLM - Managing the alternate keys

Today , its been almost an year of a healthy up and running FlexPLM system. There is a new project, to integrate it with a legacy system. Its an Inbound integration where around 700 new attributes (Single list and Multilist) will be interfaced. But the values in flexPLM were totally different that the values we configured for the FlexPLM system during our design sessions an year ago, we never assumed that this need for a new integration willl arise in future.

There were two options to interface , either do the translation on the middleware or create alternate Keys in the Flex System.

   Creating alternate keys for all 700 attributes is a small project on its own. I think we should write a program to create the alternate keys rather than doing it manually. We can use the FlexAttribute API's to load the moa List and the single list values. What do you guys suggest. can this be a generic program , using which we can automate the process of creating alternate keys ?