Truworths adopts Centric Software Product Lifecycle Management

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Centric Software has acquired its second South African customer. Truworths, one of South Africa's leading fashion apparel retailers, with 747 stores in South Africa and eight other countries on the continent, has decided to adopt Centric 8 Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software to support international growth and help structure its product development process.

Truworths is synonymous with fashion apparel retailing in South Africa, and offers internationally inspired clothing and footwear across a diversified portfolio of some of the country's most admired and recognized brands. Truworths also recently acquired Office Retail Group, a leading young fashion footwear retailer in the UK, Ireland and Germany. These brands are either internally developed or exclusive to the business and include Truworths, Truworths Man, Inwear, LTD, Uzzi and Identity, as well as the licenced brand Daniel Hechter.

In order to reinforce its competitive positioning and to continue to grow internationally, Truworths is focusing on delivering on-trend products and styles. As a consequence, the Truworths group has a wide portfolio of brands and styles and adopts a fast fashion business model for a large portion of its product ranges. A key goal is to reduce time to market.

"PLM soon appeared as an obvious solution to improve our ability to deal with an increasingly complex business," explained a spokesperson for Truworths. "We began investigating PLM solutions and spent many hours in presentations and workshops with different PLM providers. We chose Centric 8 because it was user friendly, easy to configure and we could simply make it work the way we want it to."

The Centric 8 PLM platform will be used across all of the group's brands and all product types to help structure assortment planning and product development processes in order to support Truworths' rapid expansion.

Truworths also aims to use Centric's innovative technologies—particularly its integrated mobile applications. "We were impressed by Centric's mobile applications, which work well with the core system," the spokesperson said.

"We share Truworths' passion for innovation and fashion," says Chris Groves, President and CEO of Centric Software. "We are very proud to work with one of South Africa's leading fashion retailers and bring our experience in fast fashion to help them in their strategy to achieve sustainable growth."