Shoe Palace centralizes product development
A fashion and footwear retailer is improving visibility, accuracy and communication across its product development workflows.
Shoe Palace, a subsidiary of global British athletic retailer JD Sports, is deploying the Centric product lifecycle management platform. Founded in 1993, Shoe Palace began as a single brick-and-mortar location in San Jose and has grown into a national retailer with more than 250 physical locations and an e-commerce site.
As the business scaled, particularly in its private label division, the company identified a need to update its previously manual ways of managing product development and disconnected tools such as spreadsheets, email chains and folder-based file sharing.
In addition, the retailer’s private label team manages every stage of development from initial concept and design to production and final delivery. Without a centralized platform, this end-to-end process was becoming increasingly complex and difficult to manage.
As the volume of styles and SKUs increased, tracking approvals, vendor communication and changes in spec or timeline became a challenge. To address the challenges, Shoe Palace launched a formal evaluation process to identify a scalable PLM solution and selected the Centric Software platform, which was already in use by its parent JD Sports.
Centric PLM will serve as a centralized digital workspace for the Shoe Palace product development team. All data from design specifications to material selections and size measurements will be stored and maintained in a single, real-time, actionable source of truth.
Teams and vendors will communicate within the Centric PLM vendor portal, reducing the back-and-forth typically handled via email.
The Shoe Palace team anticipates several key improvements following implementation, including advanced search functionality and the ability to standardize processes such as uploading specs once and reusing them across multiple SKUs.
In addition to improved efficiency, Shoe Palace anticipates the platform will streamline communication with vendors through its integrated messaging tools, task assignments and calendar tracking features.
"One of the most beneficial aspects is the chat and interactive capabilities," said My Nguyen, product development manager, Shoe Palace. "We can send reminders, messages and to-do items to our vendors. Tasks are displayed clearly for everyone to see. We also won't need to take extra steps to upload and send tech packs, size specs and materials.”
Along with fellow JD Sports banner DTLR, a youth-oriented activewear retailer, Shoe Palace also recently deployed the Jumpmind Commerce and Inventory solutions on Adyen Castle S1E2L Android “all-in-one” devices across a combined 450 store locations nationwide.
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