Plan to Win: Connect Product, Planning & Performance

In today’s retail environment, planning without live product, sourcing and demand data is no longer viable. Margin pressure, compressed timelines and volatile demand require retailers to connect product creation, planning and pricing decisions in real time.

Future-ready brands extend PLM with AI-powered retail planning to create a connected commercialization platform that enables them to:

• Extend value across the enterprise.
• Break down functional silos.
• Increase forecasting accuracy and inventory efficiency.
• Enable scalable, agile and insight-driven decision making across product and commercial teams.

Read on for real-world stories about how Centric Software customers leverage AI driven PLM and planning solutions to unify concept to replenishment execution.

• Introduction
• The six reasons why disconnected planning and product systems hold you back
• How to maximize value by synchronizing product development, planning and pricing
• Real-world examples of unified success
• Business benefits of a connected platform
• About Centric Software

Product, merchandising and planning teams often operate in disconnected workflows, creating delays between product decisions and commercial execution. Connected planning and product execution enable brands to move from reactive decision-making to continuous commercial optimization.

Most brands begin their modernization journey with product lifecycle management (PLM). Yet once development is complete, the go to market process frequently falls back into offline tools and siloed methods.

Future-ready brands extend PLM with integrated planning, pricing and market intelligence to create a connected commercial decision platform that aligns product creation, sourcing, pricing and inventory execution.

With a connected system, teams can:

• Extend value across the entire enterprise.
• Break down functional silos.
• Improve forecasting accuracy and inventory efficiency.
• Enable scalable, agile decision making across assortment planning, inventory and financial forecasting.

In a world of capsule collections, frequent drops and ongoing collaborations, brands that win no longer treat PLM, planning and inventory as separate functions. Instead, they operate as a connected, intelligent ecosystem built for agility, margin protection and scalable growth.

What is PLM?
PLM centralizes product data and workflows from concept through development and production. It brings teams, processes and information together in one platform, so brands create products faster, more efficiently and with greater accuracy.

What is retail merchandise planning?
Retail planning aligns merchandise strategy, assortments and financial targets with customer demand. It guides decisions across merchandise financial planning, assortment planning and buying by answering three core questions: What should we sell? Where should we sell it? And how much should we invest?

Modern merchandise planning connects financial targets, assortment strategy, pricing and inventory decisions to live product and demand signals.

The result ensures the right assortment is planned for the right markets at the right time, maximizing margin while reducing overbuying, underbuying and excess inventory.

Even the most capable teams struggle when product development, merchandising, planning and inventory execution operate in silos. What appears to be an operational issue quickly becomes a commercial one. Disconnected workflows limit visibility, slow decisions and create missed opportunities across revenue, margin and inventory performance.

The following four challenge areas reflect what brands experience today and preview the real-world examples that follow in the next section.

1. Challenge 1: Spreadsheet-Driven Planning Limits Accuracy and Speed

Many planning and merchandising teams still rely on spreadsheets to update forecasts, track assortment changes and manage performance. These manual workflows create static, inconsistent information that cannot keep pace with rapid product development cycles.

Without a live connection to PLM, forecasts become disconnected from live product costs, supplier realities and pricing targets, reducing the ability to protect margin before commitments are locked. Demand is approximated rather than validated against real product data. Assortments are locked too early or adjusted too late, leading to missed revenue opportunities, lower sell-through and increased markdown risk as teams struggle to respond to changing demand.

2.  Lack of Omnichannel Visibility Creates Misaligned Inventory Flow

As channels multiply, brands require a unified view of product performance across regions, stores and digital channels. Instead, disconnected systems obscure where demand is building and where inventory is stagnating. Without synchronized planning and product visibility, brands struggle to optimize full-price sell-through and protect profitability across channels.

The result is excess stock in some locations and stockouts in others. Allocation and replenishment decisions arrive too late to protect margin, driving avoidable markdowns, lost full-price sales and inefficient use of inventory investment.

3. Slow Planning Cycles Prevent Timely Decisions

Legacy tools and fragmented data extend planning cycles and restrict agility. Planners spend more time collecting and reconciling data than analyzing it.

When insights arrive too late, teams miss critical windows to adjust buys, shift assortments or respond to emerging trends. Delayed planning cycles reduce the ability to capitalize on demand while trends are still commercially relevant.

4. Siloed Teams Lack Visibility and Struggle to Work in Sync

Product development, merchandising, planning and operations often work from different systems and outdated information. Teams lose the ability to align product creation, sourcing, pricing and inventory decisions against shared commercial goals.

Manual reconciliation and version-control issues slow execution and increase risk. More importantly, this fragmentation prevents brands from applying AI effectively to forecasting, pricing or inventory optimization, leaving margin improvement and inventory efficiency unrealized.

These challenges appear across brands of every size and category. More importantly, they directly impact the financial outcomes that matter most: revenue growth, sell-through, margin protection and inventory efficiency.

The following sections outline how connecting PLM, Planning and Pricing removes these friction points and creates a foundation for faster, smarter and more profitable decision-making.

Role-Specific Challenges and Desired Outcomes
Different teams experience these challenges in distinct ways. Below is a summary of how disconnected systems impact each role and what they need to succeed.

Brands face growing pressure to operate with speed, accuracy and alignment. When product creation and commercial planning happen in separate systems, the cost is not just operational inefficiency, but missed financial opportunity. Planning decisions arrive after key product decisions are already locked. Assortments cannot be adjusted in time. Margin assumptions drift away from real costs. In-season demand signals surface too late to influence outcomes.

Centric PLM™ and Centric Planning & Pricing™ remove these barriers by creating one connected commercial decision engine from concept to consumer. Instead of reacting after the fact, teams plan with product realities in mind from the start.

• Centric PLM centralizes the entire product development process. It manages BOMs, samples, materials, costing and timelines, providing a single, accurate view of every product as it moves toward market, enabling financially aligned product decisions earlier in the lifecycle.
• Centric Planning & Pricing is a modular, AI-enabled suite that brings together merchandise financial planning, assortment planning, demand forecasting, allocation, replenishment, and pricing and inventory optimization, enabling brands to continuously optimize profitability, inventory efficiency and sell-through performance.

When these platforms operate as one, teams can adjust decisions while there is still time to influence gross margin, pricing outcomes, inventory productivity and full-price sell-through. Planning assumptions reflect real costs, timelines and constraints. Decisions can be adjusted while there is still time to influence sell-through, margin and inventory outcomes.

Without this synchronization, brands continue to experience missed sales due to late assortment changes, margin erosion driven by estimate-based planning and limited ability to react to in-season demand shifts. By connecting PLM, Planning and Pricing, decisions move earlier in the lifecycle, where they deliver the greatest commercial impact.

“As more users connect to a unified platform, with one version of data that can be used to harness the benefits of AI, there is a multiplier effect on the ability to innovate, collaborate, speed product to market, and produce sustainably, enabling retailers, brands, and manufacturers to better plan and execute strategies that focus on pleasing the consumer rather than chasing data,” says Jordan K. Speer, Research Director, Worldwide Retail Product Sourcing, Fulfillment and Sustainability Strategies at IDC.¹

How the integrated platform solves the four challenges

1. Solving the challenge of spreadsheet driven workflows

Integrating live PLM data into planning synchronizes planning decisions with live product, sourcing and pricing realities. Forecasts, assortments and buys stay aligned as products evolve, enabling faster and more confident decisions.

2. Solving the challenge of limited omnichannel visibility

A unified view of product and demand across regions and channels allows planners and merchandisers to adjust assortments, allocation and replenishment with accuracy. Teams understand what is performing, where it is performing and why. This enables more profitable inventory flow and stronger full-price performance across channels.

3. Solving the challenge of slow planning cycles

A connected platform speeds planning cycles by removing the need to reconcile data across disconnected tools. Teams can model scenarios quickly, respond to supplier or cost changes and update plans in time so brands can act while trends are still commercially relevant.

4. Solving the challenge of siloed teams and misaligned decisions

With one connected commercial view across planning, product and performance, product development, merchandising, planning, supply chain and finance work from the same data. Teams collaborate more easily, create aligned strategies and eliminate the friction caused by inconsistent information.

Together, Centric PLM and Centric Planning & Pricing create a connected ecosystem that supports agility, improves forecast accuracy and strengthens commercial execution. The impact becomes clear when looking at how leading global brands have transformed their operations. The following real-world examples highlight how brands address these challenges and achieve measurable results with a unified approach.

^[1] Jordan K. Speer, “IDC MarketScape,” Dec 2024

The value of a connected PLM, Planning and Pricing platform becomes even clearer when looking at how leading global brands address the four core challenges outlined earlier. Each organization started from a different point, yet all faced variations of spreadsheet dependency, limited visibility, slow planning cycles or siloed decision-making. By unifying product development and planning, these brands unlocked faster decisions, stronger alignment and more accurate in-season execution.

The following examples illustrate how the combined power of Centric PLM and Centric Planning & Pricing translates into measurable, real-world impact.

Challenge 1: Spreadsheet Driven Planning Limits Accuracy and Speed

Style Union and Ethnicity (Nexon Omniverse)

Ethnicity and Style Union are two fast-growing fashion brands in India operating under Nexon Omniverse. Before adopting Centric PLM and Centric Planning & Pricing, both brands managed merchandise financial planning and assortment decisions in spreadsheets. This made it difficult to work at the level of detail needed for rapid scale, introduced errors and slowed collaboration across design, sourcing and buying teams.

How Centric removes the friction

With Centric PLM and Centric Planning & Pricing working together, teams now operate with live product data, automated updates and shared visibility across departments. Nearly 80 percent of Style Union and Ethnicity’s vendors collaborate through the PLM portal, significantly improving accuracy and development speed. Planning has shifted from static, high-level spreadsheets to granular, data-driven assortment strategies that support fast growth.

—Alok Dharadhar, Head of Planning, Analytics & IT, Nexon Omniverse

Challenge 2: Limited Omnichannel Visibility Creates Misaligned Inventory Flow

Carhartt

Carhartt is one of America’s most recognized workwear brands, operating at scale across wholesale, retail and direct-to-consumer channels. Before integrating planning with PLM, teams lacked a unified view of product, demand and inventory across the global supply chain, leading to inconsistent visibility and disconnected in-season execution.

How Centric removes the friction

By integrating AI-powered demand forecasting, allocation and replenishment with its established Centric PLM environment, Carhartt created a single source of truth for planning, financials and inventory. This unified setup strengthens alignment between product development and in-season operations, enabling teams to flow inventory more accurately and respond to demand shifts with confidence.

—Eric Hrubik, Director of Global Application Technologies, Carhartt

Challenge 3: Slow Planning Cycles Prevent Timely Decisions

Triumph Group

Triumph Group is one of the world’s leading intimate apparel brands, managing hundreds of SKUs across global markets. Legacy planning tools made it difficult to analyze data quickly or update plans at the speed required, resulting in long planning cycles and limited ability to act on shifting trends.

How Centric removes the friction

By adding Centric Planning & Pricing to its Centric PLM foundation, Triumph gains earlier visibility into demand shifts, more automation across the planning process and the ability to model scenarios at speed. This supports faster decision-making, greater forecast accuracy and improved responsiveness to market conditions.

—Pedro Monteiro, Global Sales Planning Lead, Triumph

Challenge 4: Siloed Teams Lack Visibility and Struggle to Work in Sync

Guess

Guess is a global fashion and lifestyle brand with more than 1,600 stores worldwide. Before adopting Centric Planning & Pricing, planning, merchandising and regional teams worked from disconnected spreadsheets, each with different interpretations of product performance. This slowed decision-making, created inconsistencies across assortments and made in-season responsiveness challenging

How Centric removes the friction

With Centric Planning & Pricing integrated into Centric PLM, Guess teams now collaborate from one actionable source of truth. Planners, buyers and regional teams share the same live product data, updated forecasts and assortment views. This reduces reconciliation work, strengthens cross-functional visibility and frees teams to focus on strategic planning rather than chasing information.

—Daniel Botey, Vice President of Global Inventory Management, Guess Europe Sagl

These examples show how different brands, each with unique challenges, achieve measurable impact when planning and product creation operate as one connected system. Whether the friction comes from spreadsheets, limited visibility, long planning cycles or siloed teams, the outcome is the same: disconnected processes slow the business and dilute performance.

When Centric PLM and Centric Planning & Pricing work together, brands replace manual reconciliation and guesswork with live data, shared visibility and faster, more confident decision-making. The next section highlights the broader business benefits unlocked when teams move from fragmented tools to a single, connected platform that supports the full product-to-market lifecycle.

Centric Planning & Pricing and Centric PLM form a connected commercial execution platform that unifies product development, financial planning, assortment strategy, demand forecasting, pricing and inventory optimization, and in-season execution. By replacing disconnected tools and manual workflows with real-time visibility, brands gain the speed, accuracy and alignment required to compete in today’s fast-moving market.

Centric PLM centralizes the product creation process in a configurable digital workspace, giving teams clear visibility into costs, timelines and product readiness. Centric Planning & Pricing brings together the processes needed to plan and optimize financial targets, assortments, demand, pricing, allocation and inventory.

Together, they create a continuous performance feedback loop across planning, product creation and commercial execution, where product decisions and financial plans stay aligned, enabling brands to protect margin, improve sell-through and respond faster to demand shifts across the business.

With a unified platform, teams can visualize live product and performance data, adjust plans as conditions change and collaborate across functions without chasing information or reconciling spreadsheets. The result is a more agile, consumer-driven organization that can act with confidence.

By unifying product creation and planning processes, leading brands unlock speed, accuracy and profitability.

• Replace spreadsheet-driven planning with continuous, live commercial workflows.
• Align product creation, pricing and inventory decisions to shared financial goals.
• Improve forecast accuracy and reduce overbuy and markdown risk.
• Optimize assortments and pricing using real-time product and demand visibility.
• Enable faster reactions to supply, pricing and demand shifts.
• Empower teams to focus on commercially strategic decisions instead of manual reconciliation.

Leading global brands are already seeing significant results with a connected Centric platform:

• Style Union scaled weekly drops across more than 75 stores using real-time planning data.
• Guess increased operating margin by 6.4 points and reduced its planning cycle by 75 percent.
• arena expects to deliver 80 to 90 percent faster analysis through improved early forecast accuracy.
• Carhartt streamlined planning and inventory execution across its global supply chain through a unified platform.