GROWING GLOBAL BRANDS:CENTRIC PLM POWERS BUSINESSTRANSFORMATION AT TRISTATE HOLDINGS©2017 Centric Software Inc. All rights reserved.

An international fashion manufacturer
In fewer than one hundred years, Tristate Holdings has evolved from a prestigious tailor into a
unique industrial garment manufacturing company. Founded in 1937 as a high-end Hong Kongand Shanghai men’s shirt maker, the company soon began importing luxury Italian and French
fabrics and exporting its finished products to international markets. Over time, the familyowned business reinvented its methods and adopted a multi-level industrial manufacturingsystem that established it as a preferred partner, producing complete ranges of garments onbehalf of big brands from the USA and Europe. Today, Tristate Holdings is globally recognizedthroughout the premium fashion business for its use of cutting-edge technologies.
Tristate Holdings is a vertically integrated company with 8 factories and employs more than
10,000 people in 12 different countries. With revenues of around $290 million, the company
leads the market in luxury and urban sportswear. Its cutting-edge “Trinovation Lab,” split
between Tristate’s Chinese compound and a boutique base in Veneto, Italy, is dedicated toresearching both innovative fashions and the future of industrial garment manufacturing.
The group also owns four global brands, each with its own design, marketing and distribution
processes. These include outdoor performance brand Haski, urban sportswear brand EFM,luxury sportswear label Cissonne, and C.P. Company, an established Italian brand that Tristate
acquired in 2015. With the C.P. acquisition, they decided to put a new infrastructure in place
to help cement their business transformation and the further development of this brand.

A common foundation for allgroup business applications
Known for its fusion of sportswear, crisp Italian style andinnovative fabrics, C.P. Company had been in business since 1975
and was focused exclusively on the Italian market at the time it“We were startingto see things in amore systematic

joined the Tristate family. To better fit with the group’s otherway, because Centricbrands and to expand beyond its local market, C.P. needed to

PLM allowed us tolay the foundations for the future evolution of its business model.
Tristate recognized that C.P. Company did not have the righttechnological support for a transformation of this scale.
“As an international, multi-brand and multi-environmentcompany, we needed to streamline our product development,”

work with a wholecollection concept:
from design tomanufacturing
to selling

explains Eddie Li, Tristate’s Corporate IT Director. “We wanted to“

undergo a rapid business transformation – one that would also

make the most of the expertise that C.P. had and expand evenfurther into Europe and beyond. We quickly realized that weneeded to invest in a strong IT foundation if we were going toRESULTS

help C.P. grow to be a global brand.”++ A comprehensive project achieved in just

Although C.P. was using a legacy PDM solution, its scope waslimited to a small subset of design and development activities,
and it was only used for single products.

four months++ Legacy PDM system replaced by modern
PLM, with advanced modules“The system in use at C.P. at that time was very traditional and++ All collections – beginning with spring/data-focused, and a lot of work was done in Excel,” adds Li.

summer 2017 – now managed in PLM“There was no way of knowing which data was correct and whichwasn’t. If we were going to grow the brand globally, we knew
we needed the right product lifecycle management solution tohelp us organize collections, collaborate from a single set ofinformation, set prices and improve our organizational structure.

©2017 Centric Software Inc. All rights reserved.

++ C.P. Company is now a firm part of theTristate stable of global brands++ Extensive collaboration with internal andexternal users – a single version of the truth

Choosing Centric Software

Challenges“When we bought C.P., business did not stop,” explains Li. “Orders++ An extremely aggressive timeline forimplementation

were still coming in with a new season on the way. We picked
Centric not just because we needed a fast implementation, but also
because they showed us a flexible, configurable system that came++ Product data housed in disconnectedlegacy systems

pre-packaged with well-established processes and best practices
that would have us up and running quickly.”
Another key criterion for Tristate’s choice was the user experience– something that Li believes is critical for any successful enterprise++ A total business transformation wasneeded to take a brand global++ Limited collaboration between
departments and with vendors

technology project.
“We have to remember that our users are not IT people,” he++ A young business, with high expectations
for innovation and user experience

explains. “They’re used to working in spreadsheets, on paper or in a
legacy system, with scattered data. We needed a solution that would
give them more structure, allow them to see their information fromdifferent angles and extract the right data for further analysis.”
In practice, C.P.’s end users were particularly impressed by Centric
PLM’s custom views, single-click import and export features, andmass functionality, which allows them to easily define colors andmaterials for multiple styles at once, or easily substitute Bill ofMaterial entries for an entire season or collection.

A comprehensive PLM project,

Working with Centric PLM has also allowed C.P. to improve
collaboration with its vendors, exert greater control over its
collections, better visualize and analyze product performance, andestablish a foundation for earlier, more accurate costing that has
measurably improved product profitability.
“Across the board, the quality of information that Centric PLM now
provides has improved almost everything we do,” says Li. “We now

delivered on time

have a common place for everything: we know when things haveand on budget

gone wrong and we can be confident that when they’re fixed there

From the point of initial contact with Centric, Tristate’s core PLM
project was delivered in just four months, with an implementation
calendar defined by C.P.’s upcoming spring/summer 2017 collection.
“We needed to maintain momentum and we did not have a lot oftime for initial design work or process-by-process rebuilds,” says
Li. “Centric’s Agile DeploymentSM implementation methodology
allowed us to stay on track.”“We were starting to see things in a more systematic way, because
Centric PLM allowed us to work with a whole-collection concept:
from design to manufacturing to selling,” explains Li. “Using theCollection Book for iPad® application, which Centric deployed in justa few weeks, our sales teams could group products into collections
by price, by country or by customer, and they were able to starttaking mobile orders in time for the SS2017 collection.”

Looking forward, a strategic
business initiative

will be no more problems afterwards. We have better control andbetter visibility of where things are in our workflow, shared between
different parties and, after the season is finished, everyone can go to
one centralized source to start conducting their analysis.”With key integrations to ERP already complete, Li and the teams at
Tristate headquarters and C.P.’s Italian office are already forging
ahead with extending PLM functionality even further.
“We’re adding more and more information into PLM over time andusing it to improve operational efficiencies in other areas,” explains
Li. “For example, we are taking additional information from Centric
PLM and passing it to our ERP solution for logistics and custom
processing. In the future, we plan to use PLM to integrate to ourdirect ordering system or for business intelligence purposes.
Whatever we use it for, we can be confident that everything comesfrom one source, and if we change things at the source, the changes
will be reflected everywhere else. This will really help improve ourtop-level efficiency.”
Finally, Li emphasizes the importance of having found in Centric

With extremely tight time constraints, Li considers the speed of

Software a partner that shares the same passion for innovation

Tristate’s PLM project to be its most impressive result – particularly

and vision for the future. “We choose our strategic partners very

because it was achieved with no overspend. “For this project, thecarefully. Because things change so frequently, we always have tomarket set our timeline for us and we did not have the option oflook beyond our immediate challenges,” he says. “When we selectedmissing it,” he says. “We were incredibly happy to be able to come inCentric, it was about more than whether their solution could scale; iton time and on budget.”was about what we could build together.”©2017 Centric Software Inc. All rights reserved.

About Tristate
Founded in 1937, Tristate has evolved from its historical origins as a prestigious Shanghaiand Hong Kong tailor and developed a unique industrial garment manufacturing system
globally recognized throughout the premium fashion business for its unrivaled ability tointegrate cutting-edge technologies into the production of innovative fashions.
Since the mid-1990s Tristate has dedicated itself to creating greater synergy between
this unique manufacturing expertise and the branding processes of design, marketingand distribution, to build a group of global brands being recognized for their productcentric innovation and cultural authenticity.
As a vertically integrated company, Tristate fosters the core value of innovation andauthenticity throughout every link in its value chain of 8 factories, 4 brands, more than
10,000 employees in 12 countries, with an annual turnover of US$290 Million as of 2016.

ABOUT CENTRIC
From its headquarters in Silicon Valley and offices in trend capitals around the world, CentricSoftware provides a Digital Transformation Platform for the most prestigious names infashion, retail, footwear, luxury, outdoor and consumer goods. Centric Visual Innovation
Platform (VIP) is a visual, fully digital collection of boards for touch-based devices like iPad,
iPhone and large-scale, touch-screen televisions. Centric VIP transforms decision makingand automates execution to truly collapse time to market and distance to trend. Centric’s
flagship product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, Centric 8, delivers enterprise-classmerchandise planning, product development, sourcing, business planning, quality, andcollection management functionality tailored for fast-moving consumer industries. CentricSMB packages extended PLM including innovative technology and key industry learnings
tailored for small businesses.
Centric Software has received multiple industry awards, including the Frost & Sullivan
Global Product Differentiation Excellence Award in Retail, Fashion and Apparel PLM in2016 and Frost & Sullivan’s Global Retail, Fashion, and Apparel PLM Product Differentiation
Excellence Award in 2012. Red Herring named Centric to its Top 100 Global list in 2013,2015 and 2016.
Centric is a registered trademark of Centric Software. All other brands and product names
may be trademarks of their respective owners.

655 Campbell Technology Parkway | Suite 200 | Campbell, CA 95008 USA
Phone: 1 408 574 7802 | Fax: 1 408 884 8551
©2017 Centric Software Inc. All rights reserved.
Centric is a registered trademark of Centric Software. All other brands and productnames may be trademarks of their respective owners.