FlexPLM: Product Lifecycle Management Tool

FlexPLM is a retail product lifecycle management software by PTC, designed to manage product lifecycles in order to achieve rapid product development in efficient time through an established platform. FlexPLM enables management of the retail organization's entire product line and evolves more innovative and profitable products in the market, fast paced.

FlexPLM in a gist:

Bill of Materials (BOM): It contains all the components needed to build a product including the product details and pricing. Overall costing is decided on basis of the supplier, manufacturing costs, shipping, and quantity. Overall costing is then directly or indirectly compiled in a cost sheet. FlexPLM allows you to create single or multiple BOMs, the variation of BOMs and export BOMs in pdf, excel format.

Calendars: They allow to keep a track of milestones and deadlines. The calendar can be used for tracking a workflow progress or set up future product lifecycle milestone dates.

Change Tracking: Any object that is created, updated or deleted is considered as an event. The system can track down the changes as well as changed object details.

Costing: All the cost sheets can be viewed under costing from product library as well as line sheet. Cost sheets are specific to source and season combination. There are no limitations on the creation of cost sheets.

Line Sheet: Line sheets are used to manage products under various seasons. Seasons are considered the time duration to develop products. Most products to be launched in market are decided for specific seasons. For e.g: Sweaters are introduced only in fall or winter. Line sheet allows the creation of various specifications, filters, mass product, and colorway updates.

Measurements: In order to manage various measurements the user can create a various set of measurement objects that can be used widely over the system. FlexPLM allows you to view, create, update various sets of points of measure and measuring templates. 

Palettes: It includes adding colors or materials or material colors to a palette. It can be used to develop concepts.

Planning: User can create their own plans for product development and line planning. Planning may or may not be season based. Plans include various entities considering costing, product type, seasons.

Samples: User can create a set of samples and sample requests and manage it. FlexPLM allows the creation and managing of multiple samples and sample requests.

Tech Pack Generation: To share product information FlexPLM allows the creation of compressed zip files to share with internal or external sources who are part of the product development process. 

Conclusion: 

FlexPLM is one of the efficient software to manage product lifecycles. Apart from the mentioned capabilities FlexPLM also provides dashboards, discussions, material color and colorways, data extraction. It allows quality and compliance. It allows supply chain, store, product and connected consumer.

About Author:

Ammara Ansari is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at:  ammara.ansari@spluspl.com

SFCC Storefront

This article is in continuation to our earlier post “Intro to Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware)”. In it, we learned about the what, why & how of SFCC. Now that we have access to a sandbox, let’s dive into the technical details of a storefront.

Before we get coding, we need to know the basics of what a storefront is made of. Well, a storefront is just a website. So when it’s rendered in a browser like Chrome, it’s just a bunch of JS, CSS & HTML. Let’s look at how each of these components came to be. In order to get these pieces to the client (browser), there’s a lot going on in the server.

JS

Client-side JS is authored directly by the developer, without the involvement of any tools or frameworks. These are scattered over several files, each focusing on a specific functionality. However, these aren’t referenced directly in the storefront. These are combined by Grunt into a single minified file named app.js, which in turn is included in the common footer used across all pages of the storefront.

CSS

Style sheets start out as SCSS files. This lets us use awesome features like variables, nesting, mixins & inheritance in our style sheets. Just like the JS, these too are split over several files, focusing on specific functionality or style areas. Once again, Grunt is used to combine these into a single minified file named style.css, which is included in the site header.

HTML

The pages that make up the storefront, are written in a dynamic templating language. These get processed into HTML pages when a user requests for them. The templating language used, is proprietary to SFCC & is called the Internet Store Markup Language (ISML). An ISML file is written just like an HTML, using tags that accomplish specific tasks. All HTML tags are allowed in ISMLs. In addition, ISML defines its own tags for SFCC-specific functionality. All ISML tags have the prefix “is”: <isprint>, <iscache> & so on.

MVC

SFCC uses the MVC architecture & as such, uses “models” to manipulate data, “views” to display data & “controllers” for the business logic. ISML is the view. The models & controllers are implemented as server-side JS modules. Each controller maps to a URL. When the user enters a storefront URL in their browser, or performs an action on the storefront, a controller is triggered. The controller executes the business logic, creating & using instances of models as needed. Eventually, the controller renders an ISML as a response to the user request.

About Author:

K. M. Harish is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at:  harish.km@spluspl.com