In only nine months, Salling Group upgraded to Infor PLM for Fashion – a cloud-based PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) solution that boosts product design, planning and supplier collaboration. The company which owns department stores and retail chains across Denmark has already harnessed the system’s new functionalities to achieve significant performance improvement.
Every year, Salling Group launches six new collections of fashion clothing. Each style is designed by Salling Group, whereas the entire process from production to delivery of the final product is handled through suppliers. With approximately 200 different suppliers, mainly in the East, Salling Group has built an ecosystem of high delivery reliability. The fashion items are being sold across 130 stores in Salling Group’s two grocery chains, føtex and Bilka.
In 2003, Salling Group implemented Quest PLM and started digitalising all design and development lifecycle processes, from sketch to store. Since then, Quest PLM has been acquired by Infor and in 2016, Salling Group transitioned to the on-premises solution Infor Fashion PLM. In January 2023, the company decided to upgrade to the multi-tenant cloud version of PLM, which was successfully finalised nine months later.
More flexibility and higher performance
With a total of 120 in-house users, Salling Group needed a more flexible and high-performing PLM solution. In addition, the solution also needed to be future-ready to address the fashion industry’s increasing demands for reporting and sustainability.
“We work on many styles at the same time and with many different suppliers. So, first and foremost, we needed to ensure lightning-fast speed, so that all data related to the style including product information, bill of materials, measurements, colorway and washing instructions to suppliers and process status are being updated in real-time. We needed to reduce response times to a maximum of a few seconds,” said Karen Tretow-Loof, Senior Process Expert in IT Development and Support, Commercial and Goodsflow, Salling Group.
“In addition, we wanted a more modern software solution with functionalities that support best practices and the possibility of configuring the system with more custom fields to capture additional information. The cloud solution offers all this as well as faster development and innovation
processes. Also, it allows for suppliers to get access to the PLM. In future, we plan to invite our suppliers to join. They can enter from any device and we can set up rules for what data they can access and update. Ecosystem transparency is becoming more and more important as sustainability requirements are increasing. There is no doubt that our cloud solution enables us to react faster with high scalability, real-time updates, collaboration and more informed decision-making.”
Powerful performance Ptex Solutions, based in India, helped Salling Group implement the cloud-based Infor PLM for Fashion. The company is responsible for 90% of Infor’s PLM implementations worldwide. Previously, Ptex had also implemented on-premises PLM at Salling Group, so the team was familiar with their requirements.
“PLM’s true power lies in its ability to empower its users by embracing industry best and next practices. From a pure technology perspective, Infor’s cloud solution is tremendously powerful as it leverages multitenant cloud infrastructure that rests on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The fabulous UI/UX of Infor PLM for Fashion allowed Salling Group’s users to quickly switch to and adopt the new PLM,” said Prasham Kamdar, Managing Partner, Ptex Solutions.
“It has been a pleasure to work with the Salling Group. A smooth upgrade would not have been possible without the incredible rapport between our teams. Their team must be complimented for being well-prepared, committed and decisive, which directly impacted the entire implementation project positively,” he said.
According to Tretow-Loof, users are surprised by the short implementation phase and the intuitive, personalised user interface.
“Usually, when you go live, a lot of bugs pop up that need to be fixed. But this time, there were very few bugs. It has to do with us being good at testing, but even more so with Ptex Solutions being so good at implementing PLM. Their customer-focused approach to implementation has contributed to success throughout the entire organisation, which is why we have credited the overall project a score of 10/10,” she said.
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