Centric Software has been recognized by CIOReview Magazine as the recipient of “Top 10 Adobe Solutions Companies - 2024 ,” based on our proprietary methodology, reflecting its position in the industry. This profile has been developed by the CIOReview research and editorial team based on insights from an interview with Ron Watson, Executive Vice President of Products & Chief Security Officer.

Centric Software
Streamlining Design to Delivery of Fashion and Consumer Goods

Ron Watson, Executive Vice President of Products & Chief Security Officer

Thousands of global brands of all sizes leverage Centric Software's best-of-breed product lifecycle management (PLM) solution and its advanced Adobe connector to bring their fashion and apparel designs to life and deliver products consumers will buy.

A leader in PLM solutions, Centric Software provides a comprehensive product concept to replenishment solution experience for a wide range of consumer goods, including fashion, outdoor, luxury, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics. The solution enables these businesses to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish their products. Centric Software is continually deepening its Adobe integration, leveraging market-driven innovations to create a seamless design-to-market workflow.

Thanks to this powerful synergy, the world's most renowned fashion and consumer goods brands are able to optimize product execution from ideation to development, accelerate time to market, reduce costs and boost creativity.

Centric's cloud-based fashion PLM solution doesn't just manage product lifecycles—it turbocharges them. Through deep integration with Adobe's design suite, the platform seamlessly connects to critical business systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Product Information Management (PIM), e-commerce platforms and other enterprise systems. This creates a single, unified product data source, eliminating data silos and streamlining the path from concept to customer.

Designers can work in Adobe while seamlessly accessing material, color, trims and other libraries in Centric PLM, quickly create templates and update their Bills of Materials (BOM) in PLM, eliminating many repetitive tasks. The integration has been praised by designers for its easy interface, ease of use, the fact that it can generate reports. All this makes the Centric PLM Adobe Connector a one-stop shop.

While cost-effective, easy-to-use alternatives exist, they often fall short of delivering the comprehensive functionality and platform adaptability brands demand. This gap includes advanced tools like the innovative Firefly AI for ethical image generation. Brands seek technology that not only performs seamlessly across multiple operating systems, including Windows, Android and macOS, but integrates effortlessly to optimize workflows—a requirement that Centric expertly addresses.

“The fashion and textile industries were once slow to embrace technology, but that’s changing rapidly. Complex supply chains, competitive pressures and sustainability initiatives are fueling demand for innovative solutions like Centric Software’s. Through deep integration with solutions like Adobe Illustrator, Centric empowers designers to streamline the entire product lifecycle—a testament to the digital revolution transforming our industry. It’s about breaking limits and maximizing creative potential,” says Ron Watson, Executive Vice President of Products & Chief Security Officer of Centric Software.

Without a robust integration with PLM, design changes requires a multi-step process that is not only time-consuming but prone to errors. Designers have to manually save and download CAD files from their design software (such as Adobe Illustrator), make alterations directly in the PLM system and then re-upload the modified files. This is cumbersome, inefficient and increases the risk of discrepancies between the design files and the data within the PLM system.

Centric’s bi-directional plugin revolutionizes this workflow. Changes made by designers in Illustrator are now instantly mirrored in Centric PLM™, covering everything from materials and costs to production schedules.

Another significant advantage is the simplification of change management. While implementing a new PLM system can offer significant advantages, getting teams to adapt to new workflows can be a hurdle. Centric understands this challenge and addresses it with a user-friendly interface and a focus on intuitive design.

Centric’s cloud-based fashion PLM doesn’t just manage product lifecycles—it turbocharges them. Through deep integration with Adobe’s design suite and by seamlessly connecting to critical business systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and logistics systems, Centric creates a single product data source

Centric’s strategy is grounded in a collaborative and phased approach, often described as ‘crawl, walk, run.’ This methodology involves working closely with clients to gradually implement new processes, which effectively eases the transition for teams and mitigates the typical hurdles associated with adopting new software systems. Centric Software boasts a 100 percent go-live rate on its PLM solution.

For many years, the company has also been embedding AI in its PLM software. The AI functionality offers valuable features like a materials search and similarity search system, particularly helpful for brands searching for very specific materials through a database of previously purchased materials and identifying similar options.

As the fast-paced world of consumer goods demands unwavering adaptability, Centric Software emerges as a trusted partner, propelling clients toward a future where their visions soar, unshackled by yesterday’s limitations. With Centric Software at the helm, the journey to success is paved with seamless integration, creative empowerment and a relentless pursuit of ground-breaking possibilities.

Centric Software

Centric Software Introduces Enhanced SOLIDWORKS Connector for Seamless 3D and PLM Integration

Wednesday, May 08, 2024

Centric Software levels up SOLIDWORKS connector to break down engineering silos and accelerate time to market for consumer goods companies

CAMPBELL, Calif., -- Centric Software, the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) market leader, is pleased to announce the launch of SOLIDWORKS PDM Connect 1.0, an enhanced PLM connector for SOLIDWORKS and SOLIDWORKS PDM users. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products such as fashion, outdoor, luxury, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

SOLIDWORKS is one of the 3D CAD design solutions most used and preferred by hard goods engineers, especially among consumer goods brands and manufacturers. More than 3 million product designers and engineers worldwide, representing 240,000+ organizations, use SOLIDWORKS to bring their designs to life.

With the enhanced connector, a process that would take an entire day can now be completed in minutes utilizing PDM's own workflows in conjunction with the SOLIDWORKS PDM connector

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Centric launched a SOLIDWORKS connector in 2021 as part of their 3D agnostic strategy, extending native, end-to-end 3D product design, development and product review with integration between leading 3D design packages and Centric PLMTM. The original connector enables 3D designers and product teams to access Centric PLM from SOLIDWORKS and vice versa in order to integrate CAD functions, automate certain tasks, deploy revisions and improve communication between design, engineering and suppliers.

The new SOLIDWORKS PDM Connect 1.0 connector links files from SOLIDWORKS PDM (Product Data Management) to Centric PLM and automates the export of native 3D (and 2D) files directly to Centric PLM without having to leave the PDM environment. Engineers can also visualize and edit data from Centric PLM in the SOLIDWORKS PDM Windows File Explorer interface.

"In the past, engineers could have set up a macro with hard-coded instructions to export 3D files," explains Ron Watson, EVP Products and Chief Security Officer at Centric Software. "But then those files still would need to be transferred by those engineers to the correct location. This involved waiting for each file to generate and then make the manual transfer only when the generation is done. With the enhanced connector, a process that would take an entire day can now be completed in minutes utilizing PDM's own workflows in conjunction with the SOLIDWORKS PDM connector."

Centric PLM can automatically generate 3D viewables directly from the SOLIDWORKS file, or create a PDF from a 2D drawing associated with the file. These files are viewable directly in PLM by users across departments such as production, sourcing or merchandising, enabling them to review designs in development or build tech packs, for example.

Ron Watson, EVP of Products and CSO at Centric Software notes, "The enhanced SOLIDWORKS connector enables a seamless workflow from SOLIDWORKS to Centric PLM, turning manual processes into hands-off automated operations with significant associated time savings. Engineers free up time to focus on creating great designs and other teams gain accurate insights into designs in progress at an earlier stage, driving faster time to market for consumer goods brands and manufacturers."

"We are delighted to announce that we have enhanced our SOLIDWORKS connector to bring increased efficiencies to our customers in consumer goods," says Chris Groves, CEO of Centric Software. "As part of Centric's 3D strategy, we innovate with customers and solicit their feedback to constantly improve integration between Centric solutions and the 3D tools that teams use every day, building a tighter software ecosystem that works seamlessly to deliver benefits such as greater speed, improved collaboration and cost savings."

Centric Software Launches AI Fashion Inspiration Tool for Rapid and On-Trend Design Ideation

Friday, September 20, 2024

Fashion retailers, brands and manufacturers can explore more design options and accelerate the design process with AI-powered ideas generator

CAMPBELL, Calif--Centric Software® is pleased to announce the release of Centric AI Fashion InspirationTM, a generative AI image tool for fashion teams. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products such as fashion, luxury, footwear, outdoor, home and related goods like cosmetics & personal care as well as multi-category retail to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.  

Apparel companies need to continuously innovate and launch products faster than ever in a highly competitive market. While design teams are under pressure to create more styles and hit trends, buyers and merchandisers also have creative ideas - but have limited means to communicate them. On the manufacturing side, ODM companies face an uphill battle to satisfy brand and retailer clients, but design teams are limited by time and resources. Using generative AI to explore design ideas can help, but existing AI tools and training data are not specialized for fashion or connected to the design workflow.

Centric AI Fashion Inspiration is a fashion-specific generative AI solution for retailers, brands and manufacturers that supercharges the design process by providing AI-generated style options for any segment of the apparel industry, from garments to footwear, jewelry and bags. Centric AI Fashion Inspiration is seamlessly integrated with the design workflow in Centric PLM™ for faster alignment across teams and enhanced collaboration.

"Centric AI Fashion Inspiration accelerates the design process by enabling fashion teams to explore creative inspirations and expand design options," explains Robert Figiel, VP Market Intelligence at Centric Software. "It can also be used by non-designers to generate ideas based on captured trends with high-quality results and clean images, so buyers and merchandisers can communicate their ideas more easily with internal and external stakeholders. Designers can rapidly iterate designs and create variations on bestsellers while maintaining control over generated images and attributes."

Centric AI Fashion Inspiration is trained on an extremely large, clean and rich fashion product datasets, powered by more than 10 years of historic fashion image crawling data from 1000+ retailers. Centric AI Fashion Inspiration has been trained on more than 1 billion clean fashion product images across 800 categories with 1000+ design attributes in its proprietary dataset. As a result, the generative AI possesses a deep understanding of fashion-specific details and generates a wide range of creative design ideas with high-quality results. Each AI-generated product variation is created by utilizing algorithms trained on large volumes of data and is therefore unique, meaning that it does not replicate intellectual property.

"Centric AI Fashion Inspiration is the latest addition to our suite of product concept-to-replenishment solutions, designed to add efficiency and ease at every stage of bringing a product to market," says Chris Groves, CEO of Centric Software. "We have developed Centric AI Fashion Inspiration hand-in-hand with our customers so that they can make better use of their resources, speed time to market, reduce discounting and boost revenues. We look forward to seeing how brands, retailers and ODM companies innovate with this new solution."

Company
Centric Software

Headquarters
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Management
Ron Watson, Executive Vice President of Products & Chief Security Officer

Description
From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric Software provides a product concept to replenishment solution experience through its flagship solution Centric PLM™. With the highest user adoption and customer satisfaction rate, and the fastest time to value in the industry, Centric Software has received multiple industry awards and recognition in world-leading analyst reports and research.

Centric Software Streamlining Design to Delivery of Fashion and Consumer Goods