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