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.

In today’s highly technical, data-driven fashion environment, the limited functionality of spreadsheets and other outdated, manual-entry tools often result in significant time lags, data inaccuracies, linear sequential processes, and an inability to integrate with shared data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 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).

Design your value chain for omni-channel

Today, customers expect to shop, compare, purchase, and consume on their own terms—on their own schedule, through a variety of channels, and on a variety of devices. For fashion companies, that means operating in a customer-driven economy. Not only should your marketing campaigns drive customers to the omni-channel outlets that you monitor, but your value chain should be ready to support these efforts. The omni-channel experience must be seamless and consistent, inspiring your customers to make purchases whether they’re in a physical store or online.

For your omni-channel management efforts and value chain to be in sync, you must move toward new business models that are far more collaborative, consumer driven, responsive, and quick. But how do you design a value chain so you can get closer to your customers and quickly deliver on their needs? And how do you get your value chain partners aligned to get the right products to where consumers want them—as quickly and efficiently as possible? This eBook will answer these questions and more.

The existence of Conflicting objectives means we should look at aligning the processes and systems to enable us the make the appropriate decision and tradeoffs. But Siloed thinking and the Legacy systems deficit are making this more difficult to achieve.

There is no question that the solution is to first and foremost focus on people and process as we did in the second blog, Redefining the Processes, but technology can make a real difference to enable these processes and make the people able to focus on the important issues rather than the mundane task of data gathering and analysis.

The last 30 years have seen a huge expansion of global trade. Many of the goods we consume today are made in a different continents. The chase for the cheapest production location has resulted in complex, long lead time supply chains which have significantly increased the risk of disruptions, reduced supply chain efficiencies and increased our environment impact.

Future proof your supply chain with resilient and sustainable elements

Strengthening the supply chains in preparation for inevitable future uncertainties, and the need to be more sustainable whiles continuing to be efficient requires the development of processes, systems, and structures that enable rapid adaptation and resilience in the face of disruptions.

In this blog we’re going to look at the steps organizations can take to future-proof their supply chains, and at how they can build in resilience and sustainability elements.

A recent study, considered exactly this point. The study identified several key characteristics in this regard.

For supply chain professionals in your organization to receive the flexibility and agility they need to increase speed, drive down costs, and satisfy customers, there are four critical components your company must possess. These include real-time visibility, predictive insights, prescriptive decision support, and real-time collaborative execution, all of which can be achieved through the implementation of supply chain control tower.

Deploying a network model to achieve real-time, end-to-end visibility

Visibility is the foundation of every control tower capability, with all advanced decision making and responses within the execution window relying upon the quality and timeliness of visibility. Keeping order, shipment, and inventory status updated for all parties to see in real time is critical to success., but this often proves a core challenge for control towers, since highly dynamic supply chains can change at a rate of over 50 changes per second.

The fashion business has unique demands, and one of the most critical is the need for a collaborative design and development process. This process must be able to function in an environment of complex global sourcing, whether a company is in high fashion, luxury goods, apparel, footwear, home textiles, accessories, or any other style-based products. What makes this unique—and quite complicated—for fashion companies, is the sheer number of varieties that typically exist within product lines, such as styles, colors, and sizes. This complexity compounds further when additional lines and collections enter the mix.

In this  blog post, we’ll explore the first step in reinforcing a collaborative network which is to establish a strong product lifecycle management process that helps manage collections, sustainable fabric compositions, and design specifications.