5 ways fashion ERPs elevate product development and design

Product development and design are critical phases in the fashion lifecycle, yet many brands struggle with disconnected systems that don’t accommodate the industry’s unique needs.

Development teams face mounting challenges when their solutions can’t effectively manage product lifecycles, streamline sampling processes, or handle complex product data.

The answer to these woes lies in ERPs that are tailored specifically to fashion.

Why product developers in fashion need tailored ERPs

Standard ERPs offer support for basic processes like product management, but they are typically designed to work across multiple industries and therefore are not geared toward fashion.

This proves problematic for designers and fashion developers who require additional specialised functionality to handle complex seasonal planning.

To help show this, here’s what happens when brands rely on generic ERPs:

• Development cycles extend due to manual, disconnected processes
• Sample costs spiral without proper tracking mechanisms
• Collection cohesion suffers from fragmented data
• Quality issues emerge from inconsistent measurement standards
• Time-to-market lengthens, putting brands at a competitive disadvantage

This doesn’t mean ERPs are the wrong solution. They’re essential for business continuity. But it does mean brands must find ERPs that were built for fashion’s distinct challenges in mind.

With fashion-specific functionality, brands can better manage product lifecycles, streamline sampling processes and maintain complete control over their development journey.

To contextualise this, here are five ways fashion ERPs, like K3 Fashion, can help:

1. Complete PLM control from concept to delivery

One major challenge brands face with traditional ERPs is their inability to manage the product lifecycle within a single system, often forcing teams to use separate PLM solutions that don’t integrate with their core business systems.

Fashion ERPs eliminate this disconnection by providing lifecycle management tools that guide products from concept to delivery with structured control at every step.

K3 Fashion allows teams to create and manage lifecycle phases with automated alerts to prevent bottlenecks. Users can easily assign activities, owners, and groups to ensure complete visibility across development stages.

For example, K3 Fashion offers template plans that can be applied to entire seasonal lines or product categories in bulk, ensuring consistency while reducing setup time.

When deadlines approach or are missed, the system proactively alerts users to keep development on track.

2. Intuitive product creation and management

Speed to market is critical in fashion, but due to the sheer volume of SKUs that must hit the shelves, many brands fall short because their ERPs struggle to manage product variants.

Our solution allows brands to create new products and entire colour ranges (in different sizes and fits) with minimal effort to reduce manual input and maintain consistency across global operations.

For colour management, the Product Group Wizard enables the creation of multiple colourways while keeping them connected as a style for easier management.

These tools flex with your business needs, allowing different parameters by product type while maintaining the structured data that fashion companies require.

3. Sample management that reduces costs and improves control

Fashion lives and dies by its samples, yet many brands lack visibility into their sampling costs and processes, leading to unnecessary expenses and delays.

K3 Fashion addresses this challenge by providing dedicated sample management functionality that separates samples from bulk production while maintaining full visibility of the entire process.

The system offers flexible purchase order categories specifically designed for different sample types, from prototypes and size sets to photoshoot and salesmen samples, ensuring complete tracking without disrupting normal production flows.

By integrating sampling within the PLM framework, brands can maintain rigorous quality control with specific checks for samples, like labdip approvals and material tests, separate from bulk production requirements.

4. Strategic collection and season management

Developing cohesive collections that meet seasonal demands requires careful planning across multiple dimensions, but generic ERPs often treat products as individual items without the context of collections.

Fashion ERPs solve this challenge by providing robust collection and season management tools that ensure products are properly grouped and timed for optimal market performance.

K3 Fashion allows teams to group products by collection while tracking price points to ensure the final product mix aligns with financial targets. By linking products to specific seasons and delivery windows, brands can time product drops precisely to meet market demand.

These collection and season designations serve as powerful filters throughout the system, from allocation to pricing to markdowns, providing contextual information at every step of the product journey.

5. Comprehensive BOM and quality management

Managing multiple Bill of Materials (BOMs) and ensuring consistent fit across all products are difficult tasks in fashion that standard ERPs struggle to handle.

This is because most ERPs only allow BOM creation for an item and not the associated variants, e.g., colours, sizes and fits.

Fashion ERPs fix this by providing specialised tools for BOM management and standardised measurement data.

K3 Fashion offers predefined BOM models with templates that standardise product components across variants. It also facilitates BOM creation per item variant.

The system allows for easy updates as designs evolve and even captures third-party materials that won’t be used in transactions but remain relevant for product documentation.

For quality and fit, the solution provides standardised measurement templates that maintain consistency across styles and sizes.

Through a dedicated portal, suppliers can update measurements and add comments, which brands can review before acceptance, streamlining communication while maintaining control.

Fashion ERPs aren’t a cost, they’re an investment

When you combine all these individual functionalities together, it’s easy to see the benefits tailored ERPs offer compared to traditional, generic systems.

With improved development speed, enhanced product quality and reduced time-to-market, brands gain several competitive edges that ultimately boost profitability.

It’s for this reason that we will always maintain that fashion ERPs are an investment – not a cost.

If you’d like to learn more about how K3 Fashion can support your product development and design processes, feel free to contact us today.