WhichPLM is delighted to announce that our newest report is now available. WhichPLM’s PLM Buyer’s Guide 2018 focuses on extended market analysis, vendor & consultant listings, and intelligence, and for the first time is available exclusively as a free PDF rather than a print publication.
For seven years, WhichPLM has issued an annual print publication. In that time, we’ve covered a lot of ground – from a hyper-focused customer survey in 2011, all the way up to last year’s 150-page, wide-ranging examination of the international PLM industry and the introduction of AI to the world of fashion and retail.
In the same timeframe, WhichPLM’s readership and the retail, footwear and apparel PLM market have both changed dramatically. From small numbers of sales to big businesses, RFA PLM has passed milestone after milestone: total customer satisfaction, widespread cloud deployment, configurability over customisation, hugely expanded functionality, international adoption and more.
Almost every financial year that we have tracked, RFA PLM sales have increased – sometimes as much as 25% in a single twelve-month period. And, similarly, every year that WhichPLM has been in operation, our audience has grown. As of early 2018, our website readership figures have reached new heights, our social media reach has extended beyond even our wildest expectations, and we now reach more countries and markets than ever before across these different channels.
But while our print publications have always sold well to a loyal audience of PLM vendors, consultants, and analysts, and reached a roster of different prospects each year, we believed a change was needed to help our exclusive market analysis, vendor listings, and other key market information reach the wider audience they deserve.
And so this year, our annual WhichPLM Report is free to download for anyone and everyone as a PDF.
You may have seen our Digital Storyboard Buyer’s Guide; by making our 2018 report similarly accessible, and packing it with actionable intelligence, we believe this year’s report will reach the biggest audience in our entire ten-year history in business.
To keep this year’s publication focused, however, it does not include a customer survey, or an editorial section.
In the case of the former, the responses we’ve been provided have almost all trended in the same direction for several years; customer satisfaction is high, common challenges and best practices are clearly defined, and most PLM solutions have begun to approach a kind of feature parity. All of this makes the exercise of collecting and analysing customer feedback far less important than it once was.
In the latter case, our special editorial examinations have simply outpaced the industry’s appetite for new technologies. Today, three years on from our special focus on 3D, brands and retailers are only just beginning to make use of the technology in apparel, and WhichPLM has only just begun to actually evaluate solutions. If the Internet of Things and AI follow a similar pattern – and that is optimistic for both – then we should not expect to see proper, industry-wide adoption until 2019 at the earliest, and 2021 and onwards if we are being more realistic. This being the case, anything else we choose to analyse (blockchain being the most obvious candidate) is being done via the WhichPLM website in smaller, more regular updates, rather than as a single information-dense publication that may not be fully understood and made use of until 2022 or later.
So, we want to take this opportunity to put the essence of the PLM industry into an accessible package, in a way that serves everyone, completely free of charge.
