Venerable glove manufacturing company boosts agility with PLM
Kinco, the glove manufacturing company, has selected Centric Software®‘s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source and sell products such as apparel, footwear, sporting goods, furniture, home décor, cosmetics, food & beverage and luxury to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.
Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Rich Hoyland, Head of Sales at…
We went with Centric, because of its stability, its size, but also the really, really organized approach to onboarding.
Based in Portland, Oregon and founded in 1975, Kinco is a second-generation family-owned company that produces premium gloves designed for everything from gardening, to snowmobiling, to thermal work gloves. They provide high quality and innovation at a fair price.
Nicholas Pai is in Purchasing and Sourcing at Kinco. He describes the business for those not directly in it. “Making gloves is surprisingly technical. Shoes have a standard size measurement for the interior of the shoe. Pants have standardized sizing. Gloves can be trickier because each piece has to be hand sewn, which a lot of people don’t know.” He continues to explain that there are also challenges in the materials used to make gloves. “There are simple cotton string knit gloves, nitrile and latex dipped gloves, leather gloves, and synthetic leather gloves. Finding consistency in sizing across the entire line is a challenge.”
Read More: SalesTechStar Interview With Gerald Ang, CEO At Milieu Insight
The company has 30 – 40 vendors. They make about 180 styles of gloves and have at least two suppliers for each style of glove in different countries to be prepared for disruptions. Pai says, “We source from six different countries. We have to have shipment timings, production output timings, different Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) codes for different materials, and glove types. It can get overwhelming. For example, the US decides to do a 25% tariff on China. Okay, how do we quickly find pricing alternatives with our other factories that could make these gloves? We need to answer these questions to be quicker, more agile, and also have a place where all of our material information lives.”
Pai felt that getting a PLM solution was inevitable. “I think that every company in our size range trying to grow kind of hits a point where you just have to use a PLM.” Kinco searched for providers and in the process, interviewed and did demos with six suppliers. “We’ve gone through enough experiences with software companies to realize that service to get you to where you need to be to run, is even more important than the software itself, sometimes.” He continues, “In the end we went with Centric, because of its stability, its size, but also the really, really organized approach to onboarding. Currently, everybody in sourcing feels like they’re drowning, especially with the troubles that we’re having this year with things out of our control. We really needed to have a partnership with a company where they shouldered some of the onboarding work to keep us on track, which is really important.”
Kinco expects numerous benefits from Centric PLM, like having all material and product information in one digital hub, but there were features that were non-negotiable. Says Pai, “We decided on three main necessities that we had to have: a costing tool, a tech pack tool, and a vendor scoring system. Centric had them and we said well, that price is worth these three things that it can do.” He maintains, “When companies are onboarding PLM, I would tend to believe they usually do it when they should have done it a year or two ago, and they’re at a place where they’re feeling overwhelmed. The Centric product is a great product, but I think the support Centric brings is better than every other company that I interviewed. And that was the selling feature for us specifically.”
Chris Groves, President and CEO of Centric Software says, “I am delighted that Kinco has chosen Centric. We are humbled by the kind words about our company that Nicholas Pai has expressed; we pride ourselves on providing the highest level of service. We work closely with each of our customers—due to input from partners like Kinco, all our version updates are market-driven and based on real-world situations.”
