Product Lifecycle Management in fashion industry : evaluation of the impact of PLM tools in a specific enterprise

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is an increasingly important requirement for organisations acting in dynamic and competitive markets. In practice however, PLM is rather a concept than a system and for this reason its implementation is not simple but requires integration between different systems and structural, cross-functional and long-term cooperation between actors in- and outside the firm. In recent years, PLM has been introduced in several industries, including the fashion industry, in order to manage the new product introduction into the market and its development cycles and be able to deliver the product on time. The central aim of this paper is to define a PLM framework, describing its features and applications, and to analyze a specific case of a company which adopted the PLM approach, providing an assessment of the current scenario and giving some insights to improve PLM implementation.