Madura Garments Goes Live with Lawson Fashion PLM

Lawson Fashion Product Lifecycle Management helps Madura speed time-to-market.

ST. PAUL, Minn - Lawson Software (Nasdaq: LWSN - News) today announced Madura Garments, one of India’s leading apparel and retail companies has gone live with the Lawson Fashion Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution. Lawson Fashion PLM is a comprehensive tool for retailers and manufacturers of apparel, footwear, home textiles and accessories. It is a web-based suite of applications that facilitates the management of products from design through production. With a growing business and increasing competition, Madura Garments needed to streamline its business processes. After an intensive software selection process, Madura selected Lawson Fashion PLM to help support its product development processes.

“We evaluated several systems and found that Lawson Fashion PLM best met the current and future needs of our organization,” said Neeraj Pal Singh, vice president of information systems at Madura Garments. “We are already deriving value from the added capabilities that help us better manage our products from the time we begin designing an item until it’s ready for the retail shelves.”

The implementation process gave Madura Garments an opportunity to re-engineer its business processes to gain greater efficiencies. Lawson Fashion PLM has helped structure processes and provide better transparency of information across the company’s supply chain. In addition, Lawson Fashion PLM enables product development activities to work in parallel, which helps reduce product development timelines for new collections, helping to reduce time-to-market.

Prior to using Lawson Fashion PLM, key fabric information from mills was not captured effectively, so Madura was not able to easily re-use information between collections and seasons. Lawson Fashion PLM now allows the company to import this information directly into the PLM system and use an advanced search capability to locate suitable fabric designs that may already exist. “We are already experiencing the benefits of implementing Lawson Fashion PLM. It has allowed us not only to capture fabric information from the mill, but also saves two to three weeks in the fabric sample request process,” comments Natwarlal Bhattad, group manager product development at Madura Garments.

Previously, all technical specifications at Madura Garments were manually tracked in spreadsheets, so data quality was an ongoing challenge. Lawson Fashion PLM now helps maintain key data on a central server, which ultimately helps reduce errors. The Lawson Fashion PLM Workflow module provides tools to help proactively identify bottlenecks and alert users to any slippage against timelines, so corrective action can be taken.

As part of the project, a number of analytical reports were developed to help facilitate better visibility for decision-making. “Our primary objective was to improve visibility from concept to pre-production and then to expand this to the stores,” added Natwarlal Bhattad.

Prasham Kamdar, managing partner at Ptex Solutions, one of Lawson’s PLM partners, noted, “Madura Garments requirements were more challenging than most PLM implementations. I am delighted that we were able to meet their expectations.”

"We are very pleased to have partnered with Ptex Solutions for this project," said David Hope, vice president and managing director, Lawson Asia Pacific."Ptex has been instrumental in implementing the Lawson Fashion PLM solution for our customers. The success of this project, among others, show the high level of competency and professionalism of the consultants."