CAMPBELL, CA, July 8, 2024 – Centric Software is pleased to announce that outdoor brand and retailer Trespass has chosen to implement Centric Planning. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, price and sell products such as apparel, footwear, sporting goods, furniture, home décor, consumer electronics, cosmetics, food & beverage and luxury to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Jacobs & Turner Ltd, was established in 1938 as a manufacturer of workwear and outerwear. Trespass, is their award-winning privately-owned brand, created in 1984, focused on performance, outdoor sports and leisurewear from our headquarters in Glasgow, Scotland, UK.

Trespass is one of the UK’s most successful outdoor clothing retailers and, after many years of increased growth, has been searching out “best in breed” systems to future-proof the business.

“Like many others in our industry, we arrived at a point where the manual execution of daily activities was reaching a critical threshold. Our merchandise teams needed system support to free up time and be able to operate and strategize more efficiently,” explains Afzal Khushi, director at Trespass. “After extensive market research and discovery sessions, Centric Software was our preferred choice due to their ability to understand our nuances and their speedy alignment with our business practices. They were also our preferred partner as their “out of the box” solution means we do not have to develop or redesign solutions for the business. Although we are at the start of our journey with Centric Planning, we are already seeing benefits that will confidently take us into the next phase of our successful journey.”

“We’re delighted to welcome Trespass on board as our latest Centric Planning customer partner,” says Fabrice Canonge, President of Centric Software. “Trespass is confidently jumping into AI-driven planning, merchandise and allocation to drive more profitable assortments, and we’re honored to work with them to enable their retail planning digital transformation.”

About Trespass

Trespass was established in 1938 under the name Jacobs & Turner Ltd situated in the heart of Glasgow Scotland. With in-house designers and product experts, their team are highly talented creative individuals who explore possibilities and constantly push the boundaries of innovation. They have also developed their own technology and technical materials including Tres-Tex, Tres-Shield and Tres-Tex 3 layer fabric. Today, Trespass is one of the UK’s most successful outdoor clothing retailers providing a wide range of products from walking boots to outdoor furniture, selling internationally and exporting to over 60 countries.

They currently have over 300 stores worldwide and a network of wholesale clients across the world as well as a thriving e-commerce website which they are constantly updating and improving.

For more information, visit www.trespass.com.

About Centric Software

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric Software provides an innovative and AI-enabled product concept-to-replenishment platform for retailers, brands and manufacturers of all sizes. As experts in consumer goods like fashion, outdoor, luxury, home, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics, Centric Software delivers best-of-breed solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products.

Centric Software’s market-driven solutions have the highest user adoption rate, customer satisfaction rate and fastest time to value in the industry. Centric Software has received multiple industry awards and recognition appears regularly in world-leading analyst reports and research.

For more information, visit www.centricsoftware.com.

PARIS, France, July 1, 2024 – Dassault Systèmes and Mistral AI announced their partnership to bring the full power of frontier AI to industries in a trusted environment.

For more than 40 years, Dassault Systèmes has empowered people and businesses to provide sustainable innovations in the domains of manufacturing industries, life sciences and healthcare, and cities and territories.

Entering the era of the Generative Economy, industry has to transition from product to experience and sustainability, leveraging virtual worlds to extend and improve the real world.

The recent progress of AI technologies, notably Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Mistral AI’s is an opportunity to accelerate this journey.

Combining scientific modeling, simulation and AI, virtual twin experiences offer solutions to empower the workforce of the future. They reveal industry knowledge and know-how and answer to industrial needs for reliability while preserving intellectual property.

Mistral AI’s LLMs, including the enterprise-grade “Large” model, provide cutting-edge balance between accuracy, responsiveness and sustainability performance matching Dassault Systèmes’ requirements.

Therefore, Dassault Systèmes and Mistral AI’s partnership aims at delivering to the market:

• A new OUTSCALE offering, “Large Language Models as a Service” or “LLMaaS”: leveraging the OUTSCALE sovereign infrastructure, it provides Mistral AI’s commercial large language models benefitting from the highest security and compliance standards, including SecNumCloud.

• Generative experiences powered by LLMs: they reveal and navigate, in seconds, large universes of industry knowledge and know-how, elevating gigantic data patrimonies for Dassault Systèmes’ 350,000 industrial customers. Generative experiences play a decisive role in industrial transformation for a more sustainable world.

“We are delighted to forge this partnership with Dassault Systèmes, reaffirming our shared commitment to the high performance, efficiency, security, and privacy of generative artificial intelligence for all,” said Arthur Mensch, CEO and co-founder of Mistral AI. “By leveraging Dassault Systèmes’ sovereign infrastructure and industrial solutions, we are advancing our shared mission of driving the use of cutting-edge generative AI for all.”

“We are continuing our journey of reinventing industries worldwide with AI-powered virtual twins. Partnering with Mistral AI will allow us to offer trusted generative experiences, delivering a unique combination of scientific modeling, simulation and AI, including LLMs, in a sovereign environment with OUTSCALE. This partnership shows our commitment to building a strong technological ecosystem for AI-powered industry-grade solutions,” said Florence Hu-Aubigny, Executive Vice President, R&D, Dassault Systèmes.

About Dassault Systèmes

Dassault Systèmes is a catalyst for human progress. We provide business and people with collaborative virtual environments to imagine sustainable innovations. By creating virtual twin experiences of the real world with our 3DEXPERIENCE platform and applications, our customers can redefine the creation, production and life-cycle-management processes of their offer and thus have a meaningful impact to make the world more sustainable. The beauty of the Experience Economy is that it is a human-centered economy for the benefit of all –consumers, patients and citizens. Dassault Systèmes brings value to more than 350,000 customers of all sizes, in all industries, in more than 150 countries.

For more information, visit www.3ds.com.

About Mistral AI

Mistral AI is a global company headquartered in Paris specialising in generative artificial intelligence. It was co-founded in mid-2023 by Timothée Lacroix, Guillaume Lample, and Arthur Mensch. The company develops new models of generative artificial intelligence for businesses, combining scientific excellence, an open approach and a responsible vision of technology.

For more information, mistral.ai.

CAMPBELL, CA,  July 1,  2024 – Centric Software is pleased to announce that German pants company Leineweber GmbH & Co. KG (BRAX) will implement their Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution Centric PLM and Centric Visual Boards. 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.

Founded in 1888, BRAX specializes in pants and is renowned for blending tradition and technical innovation. Today, BRAX is based in Herford, Germany and produces four collections per year across four brands: BRAX FEEL GOOD, RAPHAELA by BRAX, EUREX by BRAX and PNTS.

A majority wholesale operation, BRAX recognized that their existing PLM did not enable the supply chain transparency or flexibility that they needed to comply with EU sustainability directives.

Seeing an opportunity to rethink both product development and design, BRAX chose to implement Centric PLM and the Centric Visual Assortment Board, part of the Centric Visual Boards family of digital boards for collaborative, visual decision-making to enable market expansion and alleviate the manual workload required.

“Our creative teams were mind-blown when they saw the Visual Assortment Board,” says Markus Lacher, director of digitalization & IT at BRAX. “They had never imagined that product ideation and design could be supported by digital tools so early in the process.”

With Centric solutions as the cornerstone for accurate, detailed and digitalized data management, the native free flow of product data between the Visual Assortment Board and Centric PLM means BRAX will be able to:

• Digitalize sampling, saving the business a considerable amount of money annually on pre-production costs alone.
• Comply with EU transparency requirements.
• Drive better collaboration and more product innovation.
• Bring collections to market more efficiently, sustainably and resourcefully.

“Before we even make the first prototype, we will save a lot on costs. Centric PLM and Visual Assortment Board are the foundation of our digitalization roadmap for our future design and product development process,” says Lacher, “With this investment, we will enable more flexible, creative design and planning to better meet demand and maintain customer loyalty, which are enormously important to us.”

“A best-of-breed approach is our priority,” explains Lacher. “We want a modern, user-friendly, cloud-based platform that is future-proofed with next-generation capabilities such as plug-ins for 3D solutions and integration with our existing enterprise systems, as well as future investments in AI and business intelligence tools.”

“We are very happy to announce that BRAX has chosen to partner with Centric Software,” says Fabrice Canonge, president of Centric Software. “BRAX is a future-focused company with a commitment to choosing best-in-class solutions, and we are honored to work with them. We are looking forward to working with BRAX to transform design and product development and achieve their business goals.”

About Brax

Founded in Berlin in 1888, BRAX is now headquartered in Herford, East Westphalia. The brand offers smart casual collections for men and women, which extend beyond the core product of trousers to include knitwear, shirts, blouses and outdoor wear. ‘We make people feel good’ is the message to all stakeholders.

BRAX supplies around 3,000 specialist retail partners worldwide, including over 1,500 with shop-in-shops, and is also represented in around 60 stores worldwide and in e-commerce. More than 1,100 employees ensure the sustainable success of BRAX with the brand values ‘smart’, ‘stylish’ and ‘passionate’.

Further information about the company and the BRAX brand world can be found at www.brax.com.

About Centric Software

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric Software provides an innovative and AI-enabled product concept-to-replenishment platform for retailers, brands and manufacturers of all sizes. As experts in consumer goods like fashion, outdoor, luxury, home, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics, Centric Software delivers best-of-breed solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products.

Centric Software’s market-driven solutions have the highest user adoption rate, customer satisfaction rate and fastest time to value in the industry. Centric Software has received multiple industry awards and recognition appears regularly in world-leading analyst reports and research.

For more information, visit www.centricsoftware.com.

CAMPBELL, CA, June 28, 2024 – Centric Software is pleased to announce that Westwing has selected Centric PLM to organize complex data and reduce development timelines. 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, footwear, outdoor, home and related goods like cosmetics & personal care as well as multi-category retail to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Westwing is Europe’s #1 in Beautiful Living e-commerce – a premium one-stop-destination for design lovers. Westwing provides a unique brand experience, combining a curated assortment of its own Westwing Collection with the best design brands in its Shop and Club-Sales. The offline stores, Westwing Business services and Westwing Interior Design Service provide further options for Westwing’s customers to integrate beautiful living into their homes and commercial design projects.

In order to reduce inefficiency and errors, Westwing looked for a single source of truth to organize data which was growing both in quantity and complexity. They were confident that an innovative, cloud-based PLM solution could help them overcome these challenges and revolutionize their working processes.

“From the beginning, Westwing Collection has been managed using hundreds of spreadsheets, emails and ad hoc documentation, and teams lost a lot of time updating and searching for information,” elaborates Felix Ehrlicher, VP Buying at Westwing. “We knew a PLM solution was the best option to help us streamline our processes and cut down on inaccuracies and data duplication.”

With the introduction of new environmental regulations across Europe and a commitment to reduce their carbon footprint, Westwing also needed one central location to track their supply chain and accurately measure the environmental impact of their products.

“It’s crucial that we are compliant with new European legislation such as the Digital Product Passport and Extended Producer Responsibility,” explains Ehrlicher. “We need to be more efficient and accurate, and the only way to do that is to capture all product and supplier information in one place.”

Westwing selected Centric PLM due to its impressive customer base, user-friendly interface and intuitive functionality.

“The team at Centric has wide experience and understand the complex nature of our products,” shares Ehrlicher. “Centric PLM is an out-of-the-box and quick to deploy solution and is perfectly fitted to manage home & living products, suppliers and all other moving parts of our supply chain.”

Over the coming months, Westwing plans to onboard its large number of suppliers onto the system in a phased approach to streamline the development process and reduce testing costs.

“As a home and living company we cover pretty much every material out there, from marble, to wood, to metal,” explains Ehrlicher. “Centric PLM will be instrumental in ensuring we are using best-in-class components from each of our suppliers.”

Westwing has great expectations of its future partnership with Centric Software and expects all teams across the business to benefit from the PLM implementation.

“I anticipate we will be able to cut administrative tasks as well as significantly reduce our product development timeline and associated processes, which is really exciting,” concludes Ehrlicher. “Decisions will be faster and made with confidence that all data is correct.”

“We are thrilled to partner with Westwing to enhance their supply chain visibility and streamline their business,” says Fabrice Canonge, president of Centric Software. “Centric PLM will empower them to remain compliant, reduce costs and quickly bring high quality and sustainable products to market.”

About Westwing

Westwing is Europe’s #1 in Beautiful Living e-commerce, with EUR 481 million GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) across 11 countries in 2023. As Europe’s premium one-stop destination for Design Lovers they offer a unique brand experience with a carefully curated assortment of their Westwing Collection and 3rd party design brands. The integrated platform combines Shop, Club-Sales, (offline) Stores, the B2B Service (Westwing Business) and their Westwing Design Service. Their team consists of more than 1,700 professionals working together on our shared purpose to “Excite people to create homes that unlock the full beauty of life”. Founded in 2011, Westwing is headquartered in Munich and went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in October 2018.

For more information, visit www.westwing.com.

About Centric Software

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric Software provides an innovative and AI-enabled product concept-to-replenishment platform for retailers, brands and manufacturers of all sizes. As experts in consumer goods like fashion, outdoor, luxury, home, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics, Centric Software delivers best-of-breed solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products.

Centric Software’s market-driven solutions have the highest user adoption rate, customer satisfaction rate and fastest time to value in the industry. Centric Software has received multiple industry awards and recognition appears regularly in world-leading analyst reports and research.

For more information, visit www.centricsoftware.com.

CAMPBELL, CA, June 28, 2024 – Centric Software is pleased to announce that the hydration company Zak Designs has selected Centric PLM to drive efficiency into their business. 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.

Headquartered in Airway Heights, Washington and established in 1976, Zak Designs creates kitchen hydration and mealtime products featuring on trend designs and everyone’s favorite characters. Over the years, the company has grown into a $100+ million business. Zak Designs sells its products through various channels, including mass-market retailers, clubs and online platforms.

With organic growth and about 2000 active SKUs, came growing pains. Chief Marketing Officer, Susan Perkins describes the situation prior to Centric PLM. “The level of manual data entry and interfacing with multiple departments is time-consuming nonvalue add work.  Data entry mistakes along with multiple departments entering the same data, create data integrity issues.” This led to wasted time, rework and double and triple-checking parts of the process.

Says Perkins, “We could have continued to operate as we were, but we’re driving towards significant growth over the next five years. We needed to simplify our structure without adding a lot of headcount.”

As the executive sponsor of the PLM implementation project, Perkins remarks, “Obviously there was no reason for us to live in this complex universe. We put out the call for PLM proposals.” Zak Designs was thorough and systematic with their approach. To determine what the company needed, the team took a step back, and mapped out current processes in detail, plus identified all their pain points. The selection process was equally thorough, engaging the entire core team and a tech consultant. Five companies were invited to bid.

“Key stakeholders played an important role in the decision-making; it was an inclusive process,” says Perkins. “Ultimately, the team unanimously decided that Centric PLM was the one we wanted.”

Centric PLM will be used across different teams such as industrial design, engineering, product development, marketing, graphic studio teams and sourcing partners.

As an international company, Perkins notes, “The language capabilities, version control, importation of data and integration with other systems in our global network were all factors in choosing Centric PLM.”

Phase 1 of their Centric PLM project is already live. The creation of a new product that requires an original mold used to involve a total of 84 spreadsheets. Now that has all been eliminated along with some of the more tedious work. “Item set-up for us was very complicated with multiple steps, taking a team of two about 2-3 hours,” Perkins says. “With Centric in place, we simply have to push a button—that is immediate payback in time saved.”

Perkins mentions another benefit. “The ease with which we can find information is vastly improved. I can just pull a mold up, and see everything that’s been created for it to determine what I want to use. It saves days, and that’s a lot of time in our world.”

Perkins’ advice to other companies looking to implement a PLM solution, “First of all, absolutely do it! But make the effort to really work it through with your key stakeholders and the Centric team to make the right decisions for your business.”

President of Centric Software, Fabrice Canonge says, “It is always exciting to witness the transformation from manual systems to automated workflows. We are grateful that Zak Designs has placed their trust in us; I know that their needs will be met.”

About Zak Designs

Since 1976, Zak Designs has been committed to bringing everyday smiles to people around the world. Whether it’s through characters that bring us a bit of joy or uplifting colors and graphics, Zak’s products warm our heart and brighten you day.

For more information, visit www.zak.com.

About Centric Software

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric Software provides an innovative and AI-enabled product concept-to-replenishment platform for retailers, brands and manufacturers of all sizes. As experts in consumer goods like fashion, outdoor, luxury, home, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics, Centric Software delivers best-of-breed solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products.

Centric Software’s market-driven solutions have the highest user adoption rate, customer satisfaction rate and fastest time to value in the industry. Centric Software has received multiple industry awards and recognition appears regularly in world-leading analyst reports and research.

For more information, visit www.centricsoftware.com.

BREMEN, Germany, June 28, 2024 – The world’s leading manufacturer of municipal cleaning and clearing equipment is implementing a comprehensive PLM system with CIM Database Cloud. The solution supports end-to-end collaboration across its global sites.

The specialized vehicles from Bucher Municipal are used worldwide in a wide range of applications. (© Bucher Municipal)

Bucher Municipal develops and manufactures a range of specialized vehicles worldwide for the cleaning of sewers, cities, roads, construction sites, and airports as well as winter maintenance. To standardize and optimize the development of its diverse product variants across different locations, the company is adopting CIM Database Cloud from CONTACT Software.

Until now, Bucher Municipal’s various sites used different PDM systems. This makes it difficult to reuse identical parts and leads to the creation of new items, which results in additional costs. With integrations to SolidWorks, Inventor, and AutoCAD as well as the ERP connection to Microsoft Dynamics 365, CIM Database will ensure consistent master data and end-to-end development processes. Employees will then have company-wide access to a central database, simplifying and accelerating collaboration between the globally distributed competence centers.

Bucher Municipal will leverage the cloud solution way beyond CAD data and document management. CONTACT’s Universal Classification enables identical parts to be easily identified and reused in the future. The CIM Database modules for variant management and control of change processes will allow the company to transparently represent complex product configurations across all design areas and quickly respond to individual customer requirements. CONTACT’s xBOM Manager will make every engineering change traceable in location- or order-specific manufacturing bills of materials.

“With CIM Database, we will use a software that allows our global engineering sites to collaborate closely,” says Olaf Witt, business engineer and PLM project manager at Bucher Municipal. After the go-live, the company plans to introduce additional PLM applications that the flexibly scalable cloud solution offers.

Headquartered in Niederweningen, Switzerland, Bucher Municipal is a division of Bucher Industries AG and achieved a revenue of over CHF 573 million in 2023. The company employs more than 2,500 people across 18 production sites and five service and distribution centers. With sustainable products like its electric vehicles, Bucher Municipal is setting new standards in the industry.

About CONTACT Software

CONTACT is the leading vendor of open standard software and open source pioneer for the product engineering process and the digital transformation. Their products make it easier to organize projects, execute processes reliably and collaborate with others around the world on the basis of virtual product models and their digital twins. Their open technology and Elements platform are ideal for integrating additional IT systems and the Internet of Things to create end-to-end business processes.

For more information, visit www.contact-software.com.

ANDOVER, MA, June 28, 2024 – Aras, a leader in product lifecycle management (PLM) and digital thread solutions, announced that product management / design and software development industry leader Igal Kaptsan has joined the company as senior vice president of product management.

Igal Kaptsan (image from LinkedIn)

Igal joins Aras from GE Additive, where he served as general manager for their software business and was responsible for driving innovation, executing product strategy, and developing new products. Prior to GE, Igal had considerable experience within the digital engineering and PLM industry as the vice president of product management at Dassault Systèmes, and several years as the VP of product management with PTC. His experience also includes several product development and R&D roles at Bentley Systems and various startups. “Igal has a proven track record of successfully delivering innovative software solutions that exceed customer expectations and drive company growth,” said Roque Martin, CEO of Aras. “His experience, philosophy, and vision will empower us to further align our product roadmap with market demands and continue to develop Aras Innovator as the leading platform for PLM and digital thread solutions.”

“Evolving market demands and dynamic customer needs continue to add complexity to the product design and engineering process,” said Kaptsan. “Aras Innovator’s ability to maintain connections to critical product information across different engineering disciplines through a unified digital thread is truly powerful. I look forward to further enhancing the platform capabilities, the user experience, and supporting customers as they solve real-world problems.”

About Aras

Aras is a leading provider of product lifecycle management and digital thread solutions. Its technology enables the rapid delivery of flexible solutions built on a powerful digital thread backbone and a low-code development platform. Aras’ platform and product lifecycle management applications connect users in all disciplines and functions to critical product data and processes across the lifecycle and throughout the extended supply chain.

Visit www.aras.com to learn more.