Fashion / Retail Industry Global Strategy Director – Infor Software
Infor has announced the release of a new version of Infor Fashion Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). The software is designed to manage the product lifecycle for both apparel and footwear manufacturers. In addition it supports functionality for home textiles, accessories and luxury items.
Bob McKee, industry strategy director, Infor Fashion boldly states “Infor understands the unique challenges the fashion industry faces. It has developed specialized applications to link designers, developers and manufacturers who are scattered across the globe, in order to help a company to work on multiple projects as one team, while simultaneously satisfying shorter, faster development cycles.”
New features
There appear to be three key changes in the new release. The first is an integration with Adobe illustrator. The Adobe Illustrator plug-in is bi directional and allows designers to focus on product innovation. This integrates the design stages into the ERP solution more fully. Infor Fashion PLM also allows concurrent processing. As a result of which users can perform simultaneous processing of different design stages. Design teams no longer need to work in a slow linear fashion. They can become increasingly agile to meet today’s demands. Workflow within the solution is flexible and lets team members work in their preferred style. All using a home page designed by Hook and Loop, the in house Infor design team.
McKee added “The intuitive user experience is designed to help make Infor Fashion PLM easier for users to adopt, which can shorten implementation and learning times, while the Adobe integration can assist with certain processes for designers that need to use both Adobe and PLM.”
New Compliance model
Throughout the supply chain, from catwalk to shop floor, there are improvements to compliance. The improvements aims at ensuring suppliers meet the fashion company compliance requirements. It is disappointing that it does not integrate with GT Nexus.
The new features allow users to create compliance templates that are uploaded using .csv files. These can then assist organisations to keep an detailed compliance trail. The release mentioned new tools aimed at supplier compliance without going into to the detail of what these are. One might have expected integration into the GT Nexus platform to deliver forms that suppliers could update to validate any compliance audits. The reliance on .csv files feels a little archaic.
CloudSuite availability for Infor Fashion
Finally, the third major update is that Infor Fashion PLM now available on Infor CloudSuite Fashion. This is welcome as it will enable customers to host their applications in the cloud without the concern for on-premises hardware. Infor CloudSuite hosts its solutions on Amazon Web Services AWS. Consequently this means that it is available in a number of sovereign nations and several regions. Also the reliability is better than many companies will be able to manage in house.
Conclusion
This update moves the software in the right direction. The integration with Adobe Illustrator is a positive step. It recognises that companies now need all their software integrated. This ensures that they can rapidly design, source, manufacture and sell their products without manual interfaces. How integrated Adobe Illustrator is with the PLM solution and how deep that integration will go in the future is not revealed. Infor will demonstrate the software at Inforum in New York in a couple of weeks time. As a result of holding Inforum in an iconic fashion city such as New York one suspects these demonstrations will be packed.
