Centric Software® is delighted to announce the release of a success story about its customer, Zak! Designs, an innovative leader in licensed and branded consumer housewares. Centric Software delivers innovative, integrated, end-to-end AI-powered enterprise solutions to take products from concept to commercialization. Fashion, luxury, footwear, outdoor, home, cosmetics & personal care as well as multi-category retail teams can plan, design, develop, source, comply, buy, make, price, allocate, assort, sell and replenish products to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.
Headquartered in Washington state, USA, Zak! Designs is an international corporation that creates licensed hardgoods such as drinkware and tableware featuring global entertainment brands. Products are sold through major brick-and-mortar retailers and online stores.
As the business expanded and licensed product programs grew in complexity, Zak! Designs sought to modernize product development, establish one repository for product data and scale efficiently, while not adding any new headcount.
“Without a formal system or single source of truth for product development, answering any kind of question was difficult… everything was always a surprise,” recalls Raymond Shill, Vice President of IT at Zak! Designs. The company wanted to standardize licensing approval processes and gain real visibility into blockers across projects.
With Centric PLM™, Zak! Designs has integrated Centric PLM to ERP, moved from scattered tools to a holistic, real-time view of projects and blockers, eliminated an inefficient item-numbering system (saving roughly a person-and-a-half of workload over a year), cutting item setup time by over 99% to under one minute —all while enabling 200% revenue growth without adding product development headcount.
In addition, the items that were previously listed as whole SKUs, are now broken out into full BOMs with detailed component data—adding no new staff to accomplish this large advance in granularity. “With Centric PLM, we now have a path for continuous improvement as we grow,” says Shill. “So far, that’s exactly what we’re seeing.”
“As Zak! Designs scales with global retailers and licensors, Centric PLM gives the agility and control that was previously lacking,” says Fabrice Canonge, CEO of Centric Software. “Complex workflows are digitalized and standardized to be able to respond faster to opportunities from retail partners—without proportionally increasing headcount.”
Read the full story to learn more about Zak! Designs’ journey and the unexpected event that reinforced the decision to unify product development under the Centric PLM umbrella.
