When you're supporting a company that's growing 40 percent per year, there's no time to think, let alone squander months or years on an enterprise software deployment. So when Under Armour Inc., a leading brand of performance apparel and footwear, opted to replace a smattering of manual and outdated systems with an integrated product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, there was no question that the company would opt for a solution that was tailored specifically for apparel manufacturers' needs.
Sure, there were minor modifications to be made and some integration work to be done. Even so, Under Armour was up and running on its PLM system in less than 20 weeks, far sooner than the year-to-18-month rollout schedule generally associated with most enterprise software deployments.
The ambitious timetable was critical, Under Armour officials say, to ensure that the PLM system would be in gear to generate efficiencies for the company's upcoming spring and fall 2009 seasons, which required planning to kick off in earnest in November 2007.
"We needed something that had an apparel maker's focus in mind. Otherwise we'd be spending too much time trying to tailor something else," says Rich Zielinski, Under Armour's vice president of technical services.
Source: Managing Automation, http://www.managingautomation.com