What does Avatar mean for Digital Fit and Online Retail?

February 10, 2010

With the huge success of the recent movie Avatar, perhaps the 3-D virtual world is almost ready to meet the real world of fitting garments to their target model. With CGI's advancing to an agreed upon lifelike level in Avatar, can more life like virtual fitting in the apparel world be far behind? 

Several companies have been researching 3-D body scanning for years, such as [TC]2. Check out a link to their body scanning site:  http://www.tc2.com/index_3dbodyscan.html.

Using their technology it is possible to create a real 3-D Avatar of yourself using hundreds of digital measuring points. While this technology is available in select locations around the world, there are also body scanning kiosks being installed in various malls in North America. With the movement and textural advances seen in Avatar, maybe strolling through the virtual mall trying on clothes isn't too far off. We might even see ourselves in a computer game like retail space in the future, using our own personal avatars for shopping and adventures.

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Optimizing value from Lectra PLM

January 13, 2010

WWA and Lectra, the world's leading fashion technology company have entered into an exclusive, worldwide partnership agreement. Now, Walter shares his vision of the fundamentals of Lectra Fashion PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) and the benefits it presents for fashion companies.

Today’s fashion industry is facing a unique challenge: consumers are becoming more and more cost-conscious, and we have to face the fact that fashion consumption is now largely driven by wants rather than needs. Together, these factors mean that brands are obliged to create desire in their customers, incite purchases, and fight for their part of market share. Merchandising needs to be appropriate to the moment, collection mix must be just right, and styles need to be on trend and on time. Fashion PLM technology can help achieve all these goals.
PLM is a vehicle for communicating all required data and events regarding the development of a product in a timely, accurate manner so everyone who “touches” the product has up to the minute information. PLM “connects” everyone over the entire product development chain, 24/7. There is a major strategic advantage to be had in achieving visibility over critical milestones because of the complexity of global sourcing trends. Company offices, freelancers and suppliers are spread across the globe, and that creates communication issues. Contributors along the value chain need to share heavy files and overcome time differences, both of which can have a major impact on the respect of deadlines. Sharing a common database helps facilitate speed-to-market (historical product reference is often an important ingredient in new style creation so a common data base minimizes search time). In a typical Excel operation, about 50% of users’ time is spent chasing data from a variety of systems and spreadsheets. PLM reduces halves this time, saving costly administrative time and permitting the user to be more creative and productive.

The toughest part of any business plan is execution of the company’s merchandising and product strategy, including sourcing. Having the vision to develop a strong strategy for the future has little value if you cannot execute. PLM helps companies understand what is in work, where it is in work, and what the obstacles are before they become fire drills. For example, if a company knows ahead of schedule that a sub-contracted product will not be delivered on time, they can make arrangements accordingly. This might allow them to avoid last-minute air freight costs, or let them warn their distributors of the delay. In the coming years, we will see that companies that implement PLM solutions with this kind of global view of the supply chain will emerge head and shoulders above the rest.

Fashion companies are be able to leverage PLM to build a supply chain infrastructure capable of meeting their customers’ needs. Their major requirement is responsiveness—they have to react quickly to changes in trends. Sourcing tools within PLM enable users to send multiple automatic requests for quotes and easily gather information received. They can assess sub-contractor performance and responsiveness. Having this kind of information lets companies compare their availability and possible delivery times to ensure they choose suppliers that are able to meet their needs. Keeping the information in a unique data bank, accessible at all times all over the world, means sourcing teams in different countries can work separately using the same information. They can thus communicate faster and place orders early in the development process, reducing the risk of products being out of stock.

It is clear that, over the next few years, companies that choose to invest in PLM technology will reap significant benefits. I know of no other way of efficiently controlling global operations than by using PLM. The question is not whether to implement PLM but which PLM to implement. The challenge is finding a vendor that truly understands the fashion industry and its processes and has designed their system to adapt to these processes rather than making customers adapt to the technology. WWA has chosen to enter into a worldwide exclusive partnership agreement with Lectra because they have robust, fashion-specific architecture as the foundation of their world- class Lectra Fashion PLM offer. They have the largest R&D organisation dedicated to PLM for the fashion industry (about four times more people than the next major competitor) and are committed
to the apparel industry throughout the entire organisation, providing strong, global support (both industry-specific and in the local language).

One of the major trends in PLM is the rapid deployment model. PLM systems used to take an average of 14 to 18 months before going live. With rapid deployment modeling and improved project management techniques, this can be reduced to three to six months. Lectra has developed its Easy Start offer so that companies can be operational with Lectra Fashion PLM within a single fashion season. This means a faster return on investment and easier change management. A good project plan and project team is as important as the design of the software. In a typical implementation, one-third of the time prior to go-live is spent on process review and project planning, another third is spent on configuring the system for the process (including any defined process improvement) and the last third is spent in training. Good implementation planning is critical to the success of the project.

For more about Lectra Fashion PLM, visit www.lectra.com/en/fashion_plm

Tags: lectra , plm , consulting partner , partners

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Why Google Wave is Changing PLM Collaboration

January 06, 2010

 

It’s impossible to speak about collaboration these days, in my opinion,  without touching Google Wave. I analyzed multiple presentations, demos, videos, analyzes and would like to present my take on the 6 top reasons as to why Wave will change today’s PLM collaboration world.

 1.    Real Time

Everything happens at the same time. You are typing, uploading, searching. You can be absolutely synchronized with your colleagues and other people involved into this collaboration process. Real-time is important because in today’s life, many forms of asynchronous collaboration and/or communication create more problems rather than benefits – and this need to change. If you look at products like 3DLive,  you will see the initial appearance of online collaboration. But with the invention of GW, you will get additional performance and adaptation boost.

 2.    Online Content

Staying connected online and in real-time, actually, opens additional doors for people who are interested in online content – IP, documents, Bill of Materials. Since Wave facilitates storage of documents on the cloud, this is will be an important overall shift toward such technologies.

 3.    Embedded

Everything you are doing in GW can be embedded into the content with which Wave operates. So, from this standpoint, future PLM implementations will be able more easily to include 3D models and drawings and documents in your Collaborative Waves. Even though I still want to see how this will happen, in my opinion, it will still give an additional push for the development of technologies which will be able to merge the collaboration of one set of data with other sources of PLM data.  

 4.    Playback History

This is the killer function, in my view. The ability to play back everything you do will be the ultimate goal for all people in PLM dealing with the comparison of history (i.e. what WAS done) vs. the future (what is being proposed by the current user).

 5.    Federation

Wave will be unique and be able to run and be synchronized on multiple instances of Wave Servers. The only association that comes to my mind in this context is past SMTP implementation. I think that GW will provide a new communication model with distributed services. So, I will be able to host my GW server, let people work with this server, and collaborate with other servers.

 6.    Automation and Extensions

This is the golden age of everything. The ability to extend GW will bring many additional people and implementations so that end-users will gain even greater benefits.

 Please, note, there is no order of importance. The current order is absolutely not scientific and reflects my memory of Google Wave stuff, and not the memory of Google itself (whom I cannot compete withJ).

 So, even if GW is still not available for a wider audience, I think we can already learn a bit about how collaboration will occur in the future.

 

Tags: plm , online collaboration , apparel tech , google wave ,

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