Behind all the glitz and glamour fashion brands still have a business to run. It’s clear that in 2023 the back-office and supply chain is in the spotlight when it comes to delivering new and improved customer experiences and meeting expectations around sustainability and product provenance.

Smart factories represent the next frontier in operational performance, combining human ingenuity, advanced technologies, and data-driven insights. At the heart of this transformation lies data and its analysis. Data is the lifeblood of a smart factory, and its exponential growth necessitates a viable conduit to ensure seamless flow. 

The fashion industry thrives on innovation. It’s what the consumer wants from us—something new, not just clones or replacements for worn-out items. New product introductions are critical to business success, but only half of them achieve the profit objectives set before launch. To improve the ratio of hits to disappointments, it is essential to listen to the consumer and collaborate with the supply chain.

The consumer sets the bar for value and the supply chain determines whether you meet or miss it. The next decade will call for significant materials and process innovations at both the micro (product) and the macro (enterprise, supply chain, and industry) level. If shorter, more frequent product introduction cycles were the only challenge… but they’re not. At strategic planning levels, the industry must figure out how to convert to more sustainable ways of doing business, starting with raw materials and research and development and expanding product lifecycle management practices to include recycling. At the operational level, rethink the way you work internally and collaborate with supply chain partners to eliminate waste throughout the value chain. If a process doesn’t add value for the consumer, don’t do it. Optimize the entire value chain and focus it on value creation. Innovations arise at every stage, when all the partners can see the value chain as a whole.

As fashion organizations grow to introduce new products or clothing lines, acquire other companies, shift priorities, and change channels to market, key stakeholders can be left out of the conversation. A networked approach to running your company can solve these problems. Collaborative networks work because they engage internal and external partners, workers, and stakeholders, helping to incentivize and execute supply chain processes more effectively than ever before.

New insights will continue to emerge as consumer behaviors shift and production opportunities evolve, but a continuously synchronized and updated network can keep you agile from sketch to store by making critical information accessible to colleagues, organizations, suppliers, and customers. Collaborative networks work to improve customer service, maximize margins, and minimize loss attributed to miscommunications such as missed inventory targets, downtime, spoilage, and other challenges. 

As industry attitudes and consumer behaviors change, so does the challenge of sustaining a business in the fashion industry. The global health crisis has accelerated the need for fashion and retail brand owners to reconsider their current business models to satisfy their digitally native consumers while maintaining omni-channel supply and ensuring sustainable production.

Whether large or small, fashion brands can turn these challenges into opportunities by transforming their business models. How does your organization meet the expectations and desires of today’s digital consumers? Are you still using old technology that might have served you well in the past but is now beyond its shelf life? If you already have an ERP system in place, there’s a good chance it’s no longer able to keep up with your business needs and growth aspirations.

The modern fashion consumer, often referred to as the conscious consumer, expects more than a transactional relationship with the brands they purchase garments from. They want an authentic, personalized, and seamless shopping journey that reflects the specific context of how and why they choose a brand. These desired brand attributes require control beyond brick and mortar supply and present challenges to the fashion brand’s entire supply chain. A label is no longer reason enough to secure a sale. Customers want to know more about the companies from which they are buying, and have developed more sophisticated expectations around the environmental impact, product sustainability, and circularity that constitutes a modern brand experience.

When extreme levels of disruption occur, supply chains immediately launch a survival strategy that tends be focused solely on the enterprise, leaving upstream and downstream trading partners to fend for themselves. Whether scrambling to enable remote work opportunities, implement flexible or staggered labor scheduling, or launch multiple capital preservation strategies, organizations have begun employing a variety of strategies to protect their supply chains and weather the storm.

To ensure the health of the overall supply chain network, the urgency to digitize processes and documents that allow both data and capital to be unlocked has become more prevalent than ever—particularly when a complex number of parties, systems, and document across geographical regions and time zones are involved.

In today’s highly technical, data-driven fashion environment, the limited functionality of spreadsheets and other outdated, manual-entry tools often result in significant time lags, data inaccuracies, linear sequential processes, and an inability to integrate with shared data libraries. When the greatest asset a fashion manufacturers can have is getting new ideas to consumers quickly, manufacturers can’t afford to let technology slow them down.

That’s why fashion companies need Infor CloudSuite™ PLM for Fashion—a modern, product lifecycle
management (PLM) solution that can handle the fast-paced demands of a 21st-century fashion business. It can help brands develop new styles with increased speed, greater flexibility, and more consistent quality.

Based in the cloud, CloudSuite PLM for Fashion lets you work from anywhere, on virtually any device.Innovate faster. Infor CloudSuite PLM for Fashion is a powerful PLM and collaboration platform that can help fashion manufacturers and their value chain partners innovate faster, make processes more efficient, and easily share information. As a result, fashion manufacturers will have the tools they need to create exciting fashions and deliver them to consumers faster.

As industry attitudes and consumer behaviors change, so does the challenge of sustaining a business in the fashion industry. The global health crisis has accelerated the need for retailers and fashion brand owners to reconsider the concepts of brick-and-mortar shops to meet the demands of digitally native consumers—while still maintaining omni-channel supply and ensuring sustainable production to allow for recycling. The landscape is evolving more quickly than many can adapt.

Despite these difficult new industry dynamics, fashion companies big and small still can turn these challenges into channels of transformation. Those who can observe and react to shifting buyer behaviors, regulatory changes, and the growing number of channels to market will not only gain a competitive edge, but also help assure the future success of their business.

As the world emerges from a Covid-19-inspired hibernation, organizations are evaluating how to ensure the return to work is handled safely and efficiently. For many organizations, this return will be more symbolic than physical as the benefits of allowing employees to work remotely have become too obvious to ignore. For example, remember then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's communication to employees, suggesting they could continue to work remotely forever?

"If our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen. If not, our offices will be their warm and welcoming selves, with some additional precautions, when we feel it’s safe to return."

This trend is unquestionably gaining momentum as other companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many others have formally communicated their intent to extend their remote work policies (some through the end of the calendar year).