Production Management
To stay ahead of the competition, brands need to deliver products that are new and fresh, while at the same time ensure they meet consumer demands, flex with production shifts, and navigate a myriad of sourcing challenges including quality and regulatory requirements. Maintaining current and accurate product specification and costing data is a difficult task, especially for global brands and retailers in industries where the products and styles change frequently.
Companies can no longer rely on manually intensive processes to manage product development and disparate communication methods with their trading partners. Exporting and consolidating important data from spreadsheets and emails is time consuming and tedious, adding to an already complicated environment. To make a measurable impact on top and bottom lines, brands and retailers need to implement proactive strategies to collaborate earlier in the product development lifecycle. With a greater focus on rapid product design, collaboration and delivery, retailers can reduce product development cycle times and improve speed-to-market.
The Amber Road Solution
Amber Road’s Material & Product Development solution provides companies with the ability to leverage enterprise data for improved decision making related to product development, sampling, material selection, costing and supplier selection. Collaborative product development ensures that retailers can track each step of the process and receive proactive alerts to potential problems. Specification management capabilities allow for building out bill of materials, specification of labels and tags, product construction descriptions and detailed instructions. Each standalone, yet collaborative solution unifies critical product, cost and supplier information to accurately estimate and compare actual and simulated product costs. Additionally, design standards, seasonal color palettes, points of measure, and size ranges are managed and monitored in one system.
Companies that understand the business value of automating and optimizing their supply chain operations have achieved greater visibility, become more agile and competitive, and reduce sourcing costs across the board.