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Bobbin led a PDM Roundtable discussion, sponsored by Lectra, this past June. Following are some comments exchanged between a variety of apparel professionals during the event. see "The Participants", page 29.
BOBBIN; How does PDM fit within your organization? Where is your company in terms of its approach to PDM in general?
SPECHT (HAGGAR): [In our tops business in our women's wear division], we generally use [Gerber's] WebPDM as a design tool, but in our bottoms business we use it as a tool to gather construction specifications and to make those specifications available to our plant subcontractors.
SAMMONS (JOCKEY): Currently we are not operational on PDM. We are implementing a calendar that will cover our entire company's needs with calendar dates, and we are meeting with PDM representatives from different companies to implement a full-fledged PDM [solution] for all of our products.
LOGAN (WILLIAM CARTER): We re kind of in the middle. We have an older PDM solution. We're in the process of evaluating where we need to go. We're moving, like a lot of companies, in different directions as far as our sourcing and our supply chain. [Being] global is something new for us, and we're finding that some of the old systems, while they worked with the old configuration, aren't necessarily robust enough to handle the new configuration. ... The system we have does what most of the systems have done in the past - manage the specification data.... But as our supply chain changes and the demands of the company change, we're starting to question what's out there, what's available, what are the solutions today? As far as the departments involved in the process, from a systems point of view, it's primarily limited to product development, technical services and our IT department.
MERRITT (WILLIAM CARTER): We have a lot of systems that each take care of their needs, but they don't communicate with one another, and we spend a lot of time doing multiple data entry. What we've done while we're looking [fora PDM solution] is implement an intermediate solution, a collaborative Web-based workspace. We keep our Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, etc. in that base where we can all get to it. It's got versioning control so that you don't run...