VF Sportswear Goes Live with DeSL PLM in 60 days
DeSL announces that VF Sportswear, including iconic brand Nautica, has gone live with its on-line PLM solution.
Operating on DeSL’s hosted PLM service, the project kicked off on 15th February 2010 and went live in mid April 2010.
The solution covers all aspects of Nautica’s development processes, including:
Line Planning, Product Design, Fabric & Trims Development, Color Management, Tech Pack Management, Samples Management, Time and Actions Calendars, Costing, Approvals, Workflow and Adobe Illustrator Integration.
The solution provides Nautica with a totally integrated, real time, web based solution involving all parties in the development process, including Merchandising, Design, Technical Design, Overseas Sourcing Offices, Production, Licensees and Vendors.
Colin Marks, CEO of DeSL states “we are particularly proud to have been selected by VF Sportswear to provide them with our world class PLM solution. Our applications have much more breadth of function than our competitors, are faster to implement and are underpinned by our superior, pure Microsoft.Net architecture. Our products are 100% web based which means we can offer them on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis or on a traditional licence basis. We agreed a very aggressive implementation timescale with VF, which included the introduction of our latest Adobe Illustrator Integration Adaptor. This delivers the seamless integration between the Creative Studio suite of products and our PLM solution, so users don’t actually realise which application they are working in. Nautica use a mixture of PC’s and Apple Mac’s which is not a problem to us as our software has been designed to run over any platform, including mobile devices such as iPhone & Blackberry.”
Peter Smith, Senior VP of VF Sportswear Coalition comments “In our evaluation of nearly a dozen PLM offerings, DeSL offered the best combination of features, scope, technology foundation, ROI and time line to use for our business. The Adobe Illustrator integration, to facilitate the Design team’s adoption of a full blown PLM, was a particular stand out feature. Our implementation occurred on time, on budget and we did not lose a beat in rolling to DeSL for our Spring 2011 development calendar.
In addition to the typical PDM functions, Nautica is now benefiting from having a fully integrated Product Development process. Of particular note in our implementation is having a real time, integrated unit/dollar Merchandising plan for the season, visible to all, making use of the electronic RFD and RFQ capabilities with online factory participation and leveraging the robust workflow engine. There are many innovative features, too many to list, but some other notables are – automatic tech pack auditing, on-line discussion forums, user defined ‘home pages’ and automatic escalations.
Like any broad technology implementation project, especially one with the aggressive timeline and budget involved here, our evolving success story is a combination of a positive spirit, a great many hours of hard work and a commitment to success by Nautica associates, VF’s Global Business Technology team and DeSL”.
