Above: This one has the web called PLM and the spider represents reporting. It has the ability to "trawl" the web, accessing every element to produce reports. (my personal favourite)
Above: This one has all the above processes, but the spider in the middle represents PLM, the constructor of the web that holds everything together.
Above: Just in case he hated the spider.
When I’m not wearing my creative hat and mincing around cyberspace, my alter-ego is donning a suit and talking sense for the PDP Limited, a consultancy specialising in apparel PLM.
PDP (or for those being pedantic, The Product Development Partnership Limited), is finding it’s feet and shedding it’s baby-grow, with our head hauncho, Mark Harrop, having been invited to be a guest speaker for Apparel Magazine’s Apparel webCONNECTIONseries.
So, to cut a long story short, Mark asked me to lend a helping hand with the prep and be a bit creative on producing some presentation slides. His exact words were “I need a spider diagram to highlight the process area’s PLM covers”.
Now I’m not typically one to take things literally but sometimes a “by gum, that’s too obvious” moment just hits. I suddenly thought, hang on, the whole thing (PLM) is very much like a web. All the combined elements of the process and the participating 3rd parties are all inter-linked, or held together, by PLM just like a spiders web would hold all it catches.
So off I trotted and did 3 variations of a PPT slide for Mark’s big day…..
In each one of the examples above, the apparel/retail processes form "never ending" circles to represent the ongoing nature of the business, tighter circles representing the goal of reducing time to market. Then all the "joining the dots of the supply chain" elements, connecting trim suppliers, mills, test labs etc surround the process circles, all encompassed and tracked with workflow.
Then obviously of course, whichever variation, there is also then deliberate pun of "the Web", i.e. PLM is the next generation from PDM because of the Web (internet)
