Iconic Multi-Category Retailer
Woolworths SA Transforms End-to-End Product Development with Centric
Iconic Multi-Category Retailer
Woolworths SA Transforms End-to-End Product Development with Centric
A Business of Firsts
Woolworths SA is a leading retailer operating in South Africa and 11 sub-Saharan African countries, and offers a unique blend of food, fashion, beauty, homeware and financial services. The first Woolworths SA store opened its doors to the public in Cape Town in October 1931 and Woolworths SA prides itself on being a values-driven organization that strives to go to market first with what matters. With a team of over 31,000 people in South Africa, over 43,000 people across the Group in the Southern Hemisphere, and a comprehensive product mix, it is an understatement to say their business model is complex.
What challenges were Woolworths facing without PLM?
In spite of their market prominence and long history of success, Woolworths SA was not immune to market challenges. In today’s highly competitive retail landscape, speed, agility and streamlined business processes are a must.
Before PLM, Woolworths SA teams were working on multiple different systems, in disparate ways, and valuable time was being lost. Woolworths SA is a large and complex organisation. The ability to trace product from concept was also a challenge. There were too many complexities in the way products would be attributed, coded and managed. Woolworths’ many different suppliers added additional layers of complexity, and quality management was not standardized across the company.
“Centric PLM is a modern and future-fit solution that can be accessed on the move. Centric’s Agile DeploymentSM project approach and highly configurable system, as well as the culture fit between us, Centric and their local implementation partner, Cogworks, were critical to our decision.” – Shane Butlion, Head of Central Business Optimisation, Woolworths SA Fashion, Beauty and Home.
How has Centric PLM helped?
Woolworth SA’s PLM implementation was delivered ontime, under budget, and with a larger scope than originally estimated. Because of the complexity of the business and size of the organization, careful planning, seamless communication and starting with the end in mind were the keys to success.
“From the beginning, we didn’t just put in a PLM system, we re-examined how we worked and identified gaps and opportunities, trying to understand how we could make the systems and the processes work better.” – Moira Alexander, Manager of Improvement Projects at Woolworths SA
“The KPIs we were tracking were improvements in our product margin, improvements in our visibility and in our critical path track and trace, as well as people efficiencies,” says Alexander. “We decided to tackle each business unit and group as we went along… putting it into a structured and phased way so that we didn’t roll it out as one big bang to the whole organisation.”
Woolworths SA has realized significant ROI since the rollout in terms of time saved, communication and collaboration, removing duplication of work, cost-efficiencies and increased visibility. You’ve seen at least a 15-20% reduction in time on some of those elements,” shares Alexander. “Centric PLM has enabled us to utilise our materials more effectively, streamline our costing process and increase process efficiencies, resulting in a 0.2% increase in product profitability.”
From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric’s flagship Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform, Centric 8, delivers enterprise-class merchandise planning, product development, sourcing, quality and collection management functionality tailored for fast-moving consumer industries.
Centric Software has received multiple industry awards and recognition, including being named by Red Herring to its Top 100 Global list in 2013, 2015 and 2016. Centric also received various excellence awards from Frost & Sullivan in 2012, 2016, 2018 and 2021.
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