In the highly competitive apparel market, time to market, and the cost of goods must all be carefully managed. German brand s.Oliver has opted for Enovia V6.

Dassault Systémes has announced a deal with s.Oliver, a fashion brand for clothing based in Germany. S.Oliver is using Version 6  Enovia. Dassault says there is big opportunity for PLM in the apparel industry because the textile industry is globally distributed and very sensitive to the vagaries of material costs. Dassault has developed specialized PLM tools for the apparel industry including the Enovia Apparel Accelerator to help companies manage resources.

S.Oliver is using Dassault Systémes Version 6 with 300 users in Germany and more than 550 users worldwide. The company says it needs to enable communication between designers in Germany, fabric suppliers in India, production supervisors in Indonesia and logistics administrators in Turkey. The system also communicates with the company’s 183 retail stores. The company says the pilot project was rolled out in one division and all agencies in Asia and Turkey, then they gradually brought on the remaining division. They accessed more than 7,000 material references. Enovia’s PLM tools include executive dashboards which can show users all the materials and relevant data such as color choices, approvals, price, availability, suppliers, etc. A fact of life for a company like s.Oliver is that margins are almost totally dependent on resource management. By 2012, Dassault and s.Oliver says  direct suppliers and third-party agencies will also be connected to the Version 6 platform.