Athletic footwear company adopts SoftShoe for product lifecycle management after six-week on-site pilot
Kirkland, WA — April 9, 2004 — Power Athletics Limited, a global supplier of athletic footwear, is set to use a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution from Global Trading Systems (GTS) to automate its product development, line management, commercialization and sourcing activities in a bid to boost efficiency and productivity, improve time-to-market and reduce costs.
Headquartered in Toronto, Power Athletics has operations in China, as well as customers and distributors worldwide. The company will use GTS' SoftShoe solution to collaborate internally and with overseas operations in China.
GTS, based in Kirkland, Wash., provides PLM solutions for the footwear and home textiles industries. The provider says SoftShoe, specifically tailored to footwear, provides a single Internet-based solution to enable globally distributed product teams to communicate and collaborate, with the goals of accelerating development, commercialization and production cycles, as well as boosting quality.
Power Athletics piloted SoftShoe on a trial basis under a short-term evaluation license. This licensing arrangement allowed Power Athletics employees to test SoftShoe on their own desktops, using their own data, during a six-week pilot program.
"There was some hesitancy on our part to commit to a mission critical application such as SoftShoe without first clearly proving its capabilities and usefulness," said Jim Russell, general manager at Power Athletics. "GTS' flexibility in allowing us to do a test run under an evaluation license gave us the level of comfort we needed to make that commitment."
Russell said that this approach provided additional benefits. "The investment we made in configuring and learning SoftShoe during this period means the live implementation will go that much more quickly," he explained. "Moreover, we have now become familiar with the software, its collaborative capabilities, robustness and ability to meet our requirements both here and abroad."
The implementation of SoftShoe is now underway. Power Athletics expects to convert existing products to SoftShoe and be live in time for the start of the development cycle for the next season this month.
Kirkland, WA — April 9, 2004 — Power Athletics Limited, a global supplier of athletic footwear, is set to use a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution from Global Trading Systems (GTS) to automate its product development, line management, commercialization and sourcing activities in a bid to boost efficiency and productivity, improve time-to-market and reduce costs.
Headquartered in Toronto, Power Athletics has operations in China, as well as customers and distributors worldwide. The company will use GTS' SoftShoe solution to collaborate internally and with overseas operations in China.
GTS, based in Kirkland, Wash., provides PLM solutions for the footwear and home textiles industries. The provider says SoftShoe, specifically tailored to footwear, provides a single Internet-based solution to enable globally distributed product teams to communicate and collaborate, with the goals of accelerating development, commercialization and production cycles, as well as boosting quality.
Power Athletics piloted SoftShoe on a trial basis under a short-term evaluation license. This licensing arrangement allowed Power Athletics employees to test SoftShoe on their own desktops, using their own data, during a six-week pilot program.
"There was some hesitancy on our part to commit to a mission critical application such as SoftShoe without first clearly proving its capabilities and usefulness," said Jim Russell, general manager at Power Athletics. "GTS' flexibility in allowing us to do a test run under an evaluation license gave us the level of comfort we needed to make that commitment."
Russell said that this approach provided additional benefits. "The investment we made in configuring and learning SoftShoe during this period means the live implementation will go that much more quickly," he explained. "Moreover, we have now become familiar with the software, its collaborative capabilities, robustness and ability to meet our requirements both here and abroad."
The implementation of SoftShoe is now underway. Power Athletics expects to convert existing products to SoftShoe and be live in time for the start of the development cycle for the next season this month.
