LAWSON FOR FASHION PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT (PLM) Lawson for Fashion Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a comprehensive product lifecycle management tool designed for retailers and manufacturers of apparel, home textiles and accessories. This flexible, collaborative, web-based suite of applications facilitates the management of products, from design all the way through to production. It will enable you to innovate faster, but with more accuracy and with greater input from both your internal and external partners. Consumers and fast fashion are intensifying the pressure to cut time-tomarket.. Experts say lead times need to be cut by 50 percent or more over the next 2-5 years. Most of this reduction needs to come from the product design and development process. Using cutting-edge design, collaboration and workflow technology, Lawson for Fashion PLM can help your organization improve the links in your company's supply chain to help reduce the total lead-time from concept to consumer. Lawson for Fashion PLM supports the following key processes: concept development, storyboarding, CAD drawing, raw materials development, product data management (PDM), color management, collaboration, vendor selection, costing, sample management and workflow management. The Lawson for Fashion PLM solution has been developed by a team with many years of experience in the apparel industry that understands your challenges. Lawson for Fashion PLM comes with over 300 built-in and configurable forms, which will assist your company in taking advantage of industry best practices, reduce implementation time and the time to benefit. Lawson has over 350 fashion customers across apparel, footwear, textiles and accessories, spanning everything from manufacturing to retail. Lawson provides a set of applications built from the ground up specifically for the industry. We aim to simplify the management of complex global supply chains to help you improve your margins. A combination of industry-specific expertise and proven capabilities means Lawson not only offers greater overall value, but also a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Lawson for Fashion PLM is comprised of the following six main modules: Storyboard Line Optimizer Fabric and Trim Product Manager Workflow Source These modules combined with the Library and Admin tools support: Common user interface for ease of use; Role-based security; Online collaboration (true web-based); Configuration; Sample management (Fabric and Trim, Product Manager); Costing (Fabric and Trim, Product Manager); Comments (mini e-mail attached to the material or style); Images; Collaborative e-mail alerts and notifications. Storyboard Physical foam core boards are still used to communicate design vision prior to product development. Much time is used creating and revising these boards and reviews must all be done in the same location. Storyboard takes the offline process online by allowing your designers and merchants to rapidly develop themes, brand concepts and assortment lines boards and share them with internal teams, as well as with your customers and partners. The initial design concept process becomes more structured and collaborative thus reducing lead times in the product development process. Using templates from the library or by uploading images, you can create product, fabric, trim, embroidery, label, color, palette, print and pattern, construction method and silhouette assets. Assets used in a board can also be added to the library. Basic data can be entered on each asset. You can easily develop and revise boards by dragging and dropping assets (or images with basic data) onto a digital board. Assets can be modified, copied, hidden and replaced easily. Once a line has been approved, boards can be shared with Product Manager and products are created automatically from the data stored with each asset type. You can easily collaborate by simply adding text notes or sticky notes. Digital Storyboard features include: Digital asset sharing with internal and external partners; Version control; Meta data assigned to digital assets and boards; Linked storyboards; High quality printing. 2
Line Optimizer Line Optimizer provides visibility from financial and attributes plans to actual development of the line plan. Financial potential of your company s product mix can be maximized while reducing cycle time and costs. Catalog plans are efficiently prepared utilizing line plan data and can be easily shared. During assortment planning and initial line development, inefficiencies rooted in a lack of visibility and collaboration combine to extend the overall product development cycle by weeks to months. Despite that protracted timeline and the many resources dedicated to putting a product line together, most companies still come out of the design and development phase with many categories over-developed and others under-developed. Line Optmizer provides merchandisers with financial and attribute planning tools as well as visibility to the design development that they require to merchandise new collections of styles at the beginning of each season. Merchandisers can associate the attributes, planned selling price and estimated units to each new style developed by the designers in Storyboard or directly in Line Optimizer s line plan. The attributes and estimated buys on the line plan styles automatically roll up to the collection and division levels to compare to the merchandisers financial and attribute plans. Current line financials and attributes can be analyzed against last year s and planned financial and attribute plans. Visibility between the design and merchandising functions eliminates over and under development of desired attributes in the line plan. Financial potential for each product mix can be maximized using analysis of cost and margin during the planning stage. When working in tandem with Storyboard, fabrics and colors can be massassociated to the line plan styles from the shared Storyboard clipboard available at the folder view in Line Optimizer. Different views such as style with attributes, colorways, fabric, channels and deliveries available in the line plan can be printed in high resolution using Storyboard. Typically, communication tends to be at the collection/range level in the concept and planning phase and this is easily achieved with the creation of comments at the folder or collection level. Catalogs can be planned using live line plan products and marketing information. Line Optimizer features include: Financial planning Assortment planning Catalog and spread planning Channel and delivery management High-level design supported (product attributes, high-level BOM, colorways,) Product marketing management 3
Product Manager Product Manager is the Lawson for Fashion PLM product development control core. It is a collaborative management tool used to create, review, share and approve all elements of specs, images, bill of materials, construction details, measurements, colorways, sampling and costing of a product throughout its lifecycle between internal and external partners. It helps reduce product development cycle time thus leading to a shorter time-to-market. Product Manager comes with an extensive list of best practice, out-of-the-box forms that are customizable and can be adapted to complex business processes. You can create products from scratch, from templates, from existing products, carried over from previous seasons or shared from Storyboard. A product can contain multiple size categories and multiple digital files can be attached to each of its forms. The multi-level variations allow you to create parent, children and grandchildren relationships within the same product. Using this feature, you can source your products from multiple vendors and create product sets. Linking raw materials from Fabric and Trim and the Library allows a mass update of bill of materials information across products. Products that are shared with Storyboard will be updated as the styles are developed, allowing you to eliminate any unnecessary data entry. Sample tracking is available from the main request tab and samples can be created for multiple products at any one time. By releasing products to external partners, sample evaluation can start at the factory. The costing feature enables negotiation between internal offices and vendors on component or full-package costing. Product Manager features include: Style development and commercialization; Variation; Colorway management; BOM management (colorway details SKU management); 3D-BOM size and 3D-BOM color; Sample and costing requests; Configurable forms; Sample evaluation management; Print classes; Report viewing. 4
Workflow Workflow provides simple and effective time and action calendars to track progress through the product lifecycle. It can help you coordinate, manage and track pre-production delivery activities on the products with internal and external partners. Workflow is a configurable tool that allows the creation of critical path activities. Tasks are associated to the different activities and are duration-based. Activities and tasks can be associated to styles for calendar management. You can assign tasks to status fields within the product, which can be automatically updated as the product goes through its lifecycle. Tasks can be set to repeat for a pre-defined number of times. You can send alerts in the form of e-mail notifications to users and managers at key milestones. The workflows can be viewed as a list of tasks or as a Gantt chart. Workflow templates can be created and re-used. Workflow instances can be updated within products and re-scheduled. Workflow features include: Activity management; Linking to Product Manager; Alerts and notifications; Template creation; Roll-up views and reports; Task management; Duration-based tasks; Gantt chart views. Fabric and Trim Fabric and Trim is a one-stop checkpoint for material specifications, sampling and costing. It facilitates collaboration with textile and trim suppliers on raw materials. With its deep specification, testing and lab dip functionality, Fabric and Trim manages all aspects of materials development and helps achieve economies of scale across brands, divisions and categories. Raw materials can be created from scratch, from templates, from existing raw material or carried over from previous seasons. You can use the variation feature to source raw materials from multiple business partners or to be tested against different standards according to the raw materials usage. Lab dip tracking and evaluation is available, as well as standard testing and is kept together with the raw material specification. Fabric and Trim seamlessly integrates with Product Manager and Storyboard allowing raw materials to be used on products and boards. An aggregated view of material usage per season is available to sourcing managers. A centralized request tab shows all sample, lab dip, costing and standard testing requests enabling you to update and track more effectively. Fabric and Trim features include: Materials development and management; Variation and colorway management; Sample and cost request; Quality standard management. 5
Source Source provides tools to streamline the costing request and vendor selection processes. Efficient and lower cost sourcing helps maintain margins. Source provides advanced costing functionality by size and color, with fully configurable costing scenarios and comparisons. You can even add different elements of calculations in order to map to complex costing processes. Costing quotes can be requested from different vendors and compared for optimal costing scenario approval. Sourcing plans and what-if plans are developed by regions, countries, suppliers and styles, and are updated automatically with approved quotes. Approved quotes are automatically shared with Product Manager. You can set up a relationship between external partners by using the vendor management module; capacity can be reserved, inspection scheduled and vendor performance evaluated. Source features include: Factory profiles and selection; Capacity management; Cost negotiation; Vendor performance. Library The Library is the backbone of the Lawson for Fashion PLM modules, providing a centralized, shared database containing reusable styles, components and projects. Library manages materials digitally, making information sharing more effective. The data includes color, style and image templates. Library is the common database where templates are stored and shared. Library supports templates for linking as well as for the creation of materials and products. In the Library, users can create colors and color palettes by season or introduction date, and can link colors across materials and products. Colors can be created using RGB or CMYK values, or other colors can be created ad hoc using the color picker. Material templates can be stored within the Library, so they can be used to develop other materials. Links can be maintained between the Library and Fabric and Trim. Designers and development teams can also create their own templates as well. Library features manage: Material templates; Style templates; Image templates; Colors and color palettes; Template tasks. 6
Admin Administration and security enables single sign-on. Security can be set up to be defined at the company hierarchy, user/role and section levels. The benefits of role-based security include: More immediate and user-friendly vendor collaboration and internal collaboration; Secure collaboration across the entire supply chain. Lawson for Fashion PLM configuration manages: Hierarchy; Each internal user that is assigned a role; Each external business location that is provided a role; Multiple roles which can be assigned to users or locations. Data dictionary; Form configuration; Creation of user fields; Field dependency; Division filtering. 7
Lawson Fashion Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Fas-11-170-5-en Lawson for Fashion PLM Modules Headquarters: USA 380 St. Peter Street St. Paul, MN 55102-1302 Tel +1 651 767 7000 info@lawson.com Americas United States Brazil, Chile, Canada, Tel +1 651 767 7000 Mexico, Honduras, infous@lawson.com United States, Venezuela Asia Singapore China, Hong Kong, Tel +65 6788 8769 India, Indonesia, Japan, Fax +65 6788 8757 Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, infoasia@lawson.com Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam Australia & Oceania Australia Australia, New Zealand Tel +61 2 9468 8900 Fax +61 2 9468 9199 infoanz@lawson.com Northern Europe Sweden Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Tel +46 8 5552 5000 Norway, Sweden Fax +46 8 5552 5999 infonordic@lawson.com Northwestern Europe United Kingdom Belgium, The Netherlands, Tel +44 1706 711820 Ireland, United Kingdom Fax +44 1706 654991 infonw@lawson.com Central Europe Germany Austria, Czech Republic, Tel +49 2103 89060 Germany, Hungary, Fax +49 2103 8906 199 Poland, Romania, Russia, infoce@lawson.com Slovakia, Switzerland, Turkey Module What it Does What it Means Storyboard Line Optimizer Fabric and Trim Product Manager Workflow Allows designers and merchants to rapidly develop themes, brand concepts and assortments online. Provides visibility to development teams while creating line, assortment and financial plans so they may analyze hypothetical cost and assortment scenarios to maximize potential of the product mix. Provides the tools to collaborate with suppliers on raw material specs, sampling and testing; integrates with Product Manager. Provides a robust product data management solution, including sample requests, tracking, issue management, and costing scenario analysis. Helps all parties coordinate, share, manage and track preproduction, manufacturing and delivery activities. Enables your product managers to deliver more on-trend products that sell at full price. Line Optimizer integrates design, merchandising and commercialization functions. Your sourcing managers gain critical visibility into component development, helping them to achieve economies of scale across brands, divisions and categories. Your product development managers can consolidate data and easily communicate with partners to capture an accurate snapshot of your products status. Your organization improves coordination with supply chain partners and has better cross-functional visibility throughout product lifecycles Southern Europe France France, Greece, Italy, Tel +33 1 34 20 80 00 Portugal, Spain Fax +33 1 40 39 25 07 infoso@lawson.com Middle East & Africa Partner Contact Egypt, Israel, Morroco, Tel +44 1344 360273 South Africa, Tanzania, Fax +44 1344 868351 United Arab Emirates infome@lawson.com Source Provides tools for enhanced collaboration with global manufacturing partners, negotiating terms and evaluating vendors. Your product and sourcing managers generate sourcing plans, request quotes from vendors, and analyze and approve optimal costing scenarios. www.lawson.com About Lawson Lawson delivers software and implementation services to approximately 4,000 customers in the manufacturing, distribution and services industries across 40 countries. Our financials, human capital management, supply chain management, business intelligence, asset management and industry-specific solutions help customers to streamline processes and enhance their business performance. As a global provider of software and service solutions, we help customers enhance their business performance and flexibility while reducing costs. Why do customers choose Lawson? Because simpler is better. Copyright 2011 Lawson Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Information provided in this document is for marketing purposes only and no warranties are provided. All brand or product names mentioned in this document are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lawson or their respective trademark owners.