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Customer Success Story
Case Study:
Chattawak Implements Gerber Technology’s
PLM Suite – webPDM™ and webView™
Chattawak, a division of Chomarat
Group, has experienced considerable
growth in the women’s wear apparel
market. With 120 retail stores located
in 90 cities throughout France,
Chattawak has recently expanded their
footprint to other European countries,
beginning with Belgium.
In order to optimize teamwork and
after an extensive requirements review
made by a third party consultant,
Chattawak decided to replace their non
apparel-oriented PDM system by one
dedicated to the fashion industry –
web
PDM, a component of Gerber’s
PLM Suite. Gerber Technology’s longstanding expertise in the product data
management marketplace became the
critical criteria in Chattawak’s decision
making process.
The primary challenge Chattawak
faced was to effectively manage business processes across their three main
locations: Paris, Le Cheylard and
Tunisia. Chattawak’s specific concerns
included collaboration, duplication, synchronization and avoiding the risk of
errors caused by lack of real-time data.
Gerber Technology’s webPDM software was installed at the Le Cheylard
location, where all Chattawak IT infra-
structures are located. Implementing a
centralized system allows all teams to
work with the same data using the
same tools and processes. “With this
web-based technology, it has allowed
us to expedite the deployment of information and provide real-time responses,
even from remote sites”, commented
Patrick Champalle, group IT Director.
In order to avoid duplicate data
input, an interface was developed
between webPDM and their home-grown
ERP system – Zephyr. Existing material,
trim, size and color data are now integrated into webPDM. All material and
product information are keyed into this
single application, thereby reducing the
risk of errors and increasing productivity.
Due to a lack of internal resources
and experience, Chattawak contracted
senior level Gerber Technology consultants to create an advanced configuration to meet their business process
requirements.
After deployment and initial user
training, administration and development capabilities were transferred to
the Chattawak team. Their IT group is
now equipped with the tools and
knowledge to adapt the software to
their company evolution and any future
business requirements. Throughout the
implementation process, both the
Chattawak and Gerber teams communicated extensively to fine-tune the configuration in response to user feedback.
“Like any implementation process, we
went through many reiterations until we
received full satisfaction from our internal
customers. This flow of communication
allowed us to discover needs which
were not initially identified during the
requirements gathering phase. Thanks
to the Gerber consultant’s high level of
expertise, we were able to successfully
implement webPDM in a timely manner –
more efficient than an independent project management group,” remarked
Kader Zahzah, Accounting manager
and webPDM project manager.
View, a workflow, calendaring, and
task management component of
Gerber’s PLM Suite, was also implemented with webPDM. Milestones that once
resided solely in emails and a myriad of
Excel spreadsheets are now organized,
visible and expanded through the use of
web
View. Chattawak was able to create
customized webView Dashboards to meet
their specific needs enabling managers to
supervise product development and team
performances in real time.
web
Today, Chattawak works in a fully collaborative mode within a unique product data
management system. The obsolete Word
and Excel files have disappeared and
internal business rules have been significantly clarified. A principle rule now used
requires information owners to directly input
all data into the application. It saves time,
simplifies organization and avoids information loss that occurred frequently when
instructions were only verbally communicated during a fitting session.
An immediate and visible benefit is
that information is now more reliable.
For example, Chattawak experienced
price differences between the values
printed on price labels versus the values
stored within the retail IT system.
Products arriving extremely late were
the cause of these price modifications.
Due to the webPDM/ERP interface, the
new system will trigger the order of price
labels when a certain development
stage is reached, and in a later stage the
application will block any price modification…all thanks to webPDM’s advanced
permission capabilities.
“As for ‘Time to Market’ reduction, it is
too early to measure these effects, but it is
clear that work method optimization, realtime supervision and information reliability
increases can only have positive effects,”
states Stéphane Chomarat, Chattawak
CEO. “Team productivity is rising, which
will permit us to develop more styles
before each new season and keep up with
our clients’ demands.”
© 2009 Gerber Technology. All rights reserved. webPDM and webView are trademarks of Gerber Technology.