PTC Retail Launches Flex Insights Platform
In response to customer and market demands, PTC Retail announced the availability of Flex Insights, which is a low-code platform “designed to help brands and retailers unlock the power of their data to drive faster and better decision-making during planning and product development,” the company said in a statement.
PTC said by leveraging its ThingWorx IoT technology, Flex Insights connects data across enterprise systems and applies AI capabilities to enable brands and retailers to make faster and better decisions.
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PTC said Flex Insights extends the industry-leading capabilities “and feature-rich functionality of PTC’s retail product life cycle management platform, FlexPLM, and is available through simple, visual, easy to use and intuitive apps, including, but not limited to, critical path management, compliance tracking, visual line planning and sustainability analytics.” The company said personalization features improve the user experience “and put real-time data, imagery and actionable insights at user’s fingertips.”
Corina Brügger, service transition manager at Intersport, the sporting goods retailer, said the company is “constantly striving to improve business processes to drive speed, collaboration and efficiency. The Flex Insights Critical Path Management app shows everyone the status of each product and the steps that need to be completed to get our products to market faster.”
PTC said its easy-to-deploy and configurable apps “empower brands and retailers to access actionable intelligence most important to their specific business needs and challenges.” This included the Critical Path Management app, which provides product teams and senior management “with up-to-the-minute views of the progress of each product and across the entire season’s line, enabling them to quickly address steps needed to get them to market on time.”
A Compliance Tracking app also allows product teams “to define what sustainability and social compliance documents are required for specific products, and to track and manage the data in those documents to support reporting.” Meanwhile, the sustainability app “enables rapid integration between FlexPLM and leading sustainability solutions, such as Worldly (formerly Higg) and Made2Flow.” The Visual Line Planning app automates seasonal line reviews, “making it easier to set up reviews, collaborate with remote team members, capture notes and update plans.”
Bill Brewster, senior vice president and general manager of PTC’s Retail Business Unit, said in today’s fast-paced environment, “brands and retailers have no shortage of data, but many continue to struggle with how to harness their critical business information. They spend a lot of time managing data and generating reports, yet still find it difficult to get the right information, to the right people, in the right format quickly enough to make meaningful business decisions.”
Brewster said he was excited to announce the availability of Flex Insights, “with its ability to analyze large amounts of data, this customer-proven offer from PTC Retail has the ability to help companies make better product development decisions with speed, accuracy and efficiency, uncovering correlations and identifying patterns that were once not possible.”
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