Supporting product development in the textile industry through the use of a product lifecycle management approach: a preliminary set of guidelines

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is in some segments, such in the aerospace and defence (A&D) and automotive fields, a well-known business approach to support product development. However, while these markets recognise the power of PLM, others, such as textile, which searches for more performing solutions to meet the new globalised market competitiveness, still need to take the first steps towards a better understanding of how its processes/features could support the company businesses. For this reason, this paper aims to provide a roadmap about where and how PLM could support the development of textile products, in particular those ones that should be quickly innovated in order to answer to the volatile customers' demand (fast fashion scenario), adopting a user-centred approach. Starting from a rigorous formalisation of the textile New Product Introduction (NPI) process, weaknesses and strengths have been then formalised via the involvement of NPI stakeholders catching and analysing their needs as users/actors. This set of requirements has been then correlated with the PLM features, through the use of Quality Function Deployment (QFD), in order to define a set of guidelines describing for each NPI process how PLM processes/features could be linked and which benefits could be obtained with this link. These guidelines could help textile companies to have a clearer idea of the advantages that could be obtained through the adoption of the PLM approach. Hence, the proposed methodology is able to provide to the company with a quantification of the impact of the PLM features on its processes. Moreover, it could support vendors to provide their solutions with more tailored features.