Duquesne, PA November 18, 2024  – American Textile Company (ATC) was featured in the November edition of Sourcing Journal. Nancy Zimmerman, ATC Vice President of Product Development joined an expert panel at the publication’s sourcing summit to describe ATC’s digital transformation efforts. Core to this transformation is Centric PLM, which creates a single source of truth for product and sourcing, replacing a collection of documents and spreadsheets spread across its global locations. You can read the full article below.

You Can’t Manage Global Supply Chains Without a Single Source of Truth

After bedding manufacturer American Textile Company (AllerEase, Sealy, Tempur-Pedic, etc.) expanded its single, local production facility to a multi-continent, global supply chain, it faced a hard truth: its beloved Excel spreadsheets, pdfs and Word documents weren’t cutting it. In fact, they were slowing down development and sourcing efforts. Today, the 99-year-old, privately held, family-owned company is a success story for digital transformation and change management.

In the panel “Local to Global: Building an American Powerhouse,” Nancy Zimmerman, vice president & head of product development, American Textile, sat down with Trevor Bremner, sales director, North America, Centric Software, and Sarah Jones, senior editor, strategic content, Sourcing Journal, to explain how they did it.

“We had reached the limitations with our suite of Microsoft Office products,” said Zimmerman. “We implemented Centric [PLM] two years ago and that has really allowed us to both diversify our supply chain [and] get to market faster. We have a single source of truth. We’re providing our tech packs to our suppliers in a more robust way, and it helps us internally as we are trying to manage and measure our business better and also as we’re looking to build more robust relational versus transactional relationships with our supply chain.”

While American Textile deals with bedding, Centric’s Bremner says the pain points that apparel and footwear companies have are all the same, and they can only be managed with a single source of truth.

“It comes down to a lot of collaboration…being able to work on the same projects, the same documents, and being able to work with your suppliers and your vendors overseas or locally, to have them in the same system through a portal to manage bill of materials, tech packs, quotes and everything in the same system,” said Bremner.

Failure to do so amid complex supply chains will increase bottlenecks, inefficiencies and costs, he warned, and failure to embrace a digital system “will slow your whole process of getting product out the door and into the market.”

Centric goes beyond product lifestyle management to include everything from merchandise financial planning to artificial intelligence for design inspiration and market intelligence for pricing help. It’s all about getting product right and getting it into consumer’s hands quickly.

“For us, having that database where all of our information is-our materials library, certifications, traceability documents-all of that is in our system now, so it allows us, whether we are going to market for Target or Walmart, to push that tech pack out to our supply chain pretty quickly,” said Zimmerman.

Data, or course, needs to be clean to be effective. “Overall, it’s enabled us to cut anywhere from two weeks to two months off of our lead time, simply because we have that data. It’s been scrubbed, it’s in a system, and it’s been validated, and so it’s helped our speed to market, but then on the other side, it’s also helped our profitability.”

Before a company can reap the benefits of new technology, however, the team must embrace it, and Bremner said two things need to happen for an effective change management strategy. First, you must be prepared with an experienced team managing the change, because “it’s a transformation and you can’t underestimate it.” Second is making sure people see the big light at the end of the tunnel and are always marching toward it, maybe by celebrating wins or milestones. “As long as they see the value and the benefit at the end, you can maintain that momentum.”