PLM selection, data governance and wholesale operations

Finisterre already had a PLM and NetSuite when we arrived, so the obvious brief of picking a new PLM was only part of the answer. Getting the most out of any tool comes down to how it is adopted and how people are onboarded onto it, and we said that up front before running a selection process.

The line we put to the room during range planning, more or less verbatim: the notion that tech will be a silver bullet - it won't be. It will be as much, if not more, about people and process.

Most PLM and ERP software covers around 80% of what a brand needs out of the box, so a selection process that scores all of it spends most of its time on things that don't separate the options. We ran a compressed one on four principles.

Score only the 20% that differentiates. Separate the software decision from the implementation partner decision, because the partner has a big say in whether the project succeeds.

Run a paid discovery phase before committing to the full build. And ask for case studies showing delivery at comparable scale.

The board got two costed paths with the trade-offs written down, and chose the lighter route, with value expected inside a quarter or two.

Rechain was selected, and phase one went live in December 2025 - product, colour, component and measurement libraries, BOM and tech pack templates, item creation into NetSuite and priority user training. Historical products were migrated and mapped to a new hierarchy.

This is the most transferable thing we built.

A PLM enforces data completeness through mandatory fields tied to workflow status, so a product can't move to the next stage until the required fields are filled. That is exactly right, but a PLM has no concept of a deadline.

It will tell you a product isn't ready without telling you it needed to be ready last Thursday.

So we modelled two mandatory field sets - a slim wholesale catalogue set needed early in the critical path, and a wider set needed before go-to-market - and built a tracker that joins critical-path milestone dates to live PLM data. The team gets a daily forward-looking readiness view, with each status assigned to a named owner.

Alongside it we redesigned the critical path down to a maximum of fifteen strategic milestones, with actual-versus-target monitoring, data completion points tied to each milestone and an agreed escalation route for missed dates.

Two smaller problems worth describing, because the fixes are the useful part.

Sales samples and real sizes. A matrix item can't hold two children with the same size, so samples raised against real sizes were getting in the way of bulk SKUs.

The going-forward fix is a dedicated sample size at the end of the measurement chart, left unselected so it never shows in the size range, with the SKU and barcode generated automatically.

Swatches. Fabric swatches aren't products, but suppliers charge for them, so a purchase order has to be raised against them, and around one product in five needs them each season.

The answer was a CSV upload that creates child SKUs with a distinguishing suffix and barcodes from a pre-allocated batch, kept outside the PLM so an automatic sync can't overwrite them.

With product data and the critical path in a much better place, our current work with Finisterre is on wholesale operations. We're helping the team shape how wholesale quantities and allocation run through NetSuite and onto purchase orders, so everyone working on a season can see where it stands.