Zak Designs Drives Revenue Growth With Streamlined Product Lifecycle Management
Zak Designs, a manufacturer of licensed and branded consumer housewares, is streamlining its product lifecycle management with a focus on long-term scalability.
The company sought a solution to increasing complexity within its product development processes as the business expanded. It identified 22 pain points across licensing, approvals, product data and project visibility, noting that relying on manual tools such as spreadsheets and institutional knowledge was no longer time- or cost-efficient.
As a result, the company wanted to establish a single repository for its product data by scaling efficiency without increasing staffing. Additionally, it aimed to standardize the licensing approval process to increase visibility.
"Without a formal system or single source of truth for product development, answering any kind of question was difficult … everything was always a surprise," Raymond Shill, VP of IT at Zak Designs, said in a statement.
Zak Designs worked with Centric Software to integrate a product lifecycle management platform that could streamline efforts, moving away from a scattered-tool approach with a complex item-number tracking system.
The automated efforts have resulted in 200% revenue growth over the past 4-5 years and reduced item setup time to under a minute.
Shill said that removing the previous product tracking system has also saved the equivalent of about 1.5 full-time worker hours over the course of a year, freeing up team members to focus on more value-added tasks.
This was done by transitioning the company from whole-SKU items to segmented, full BOMs with more detailed component data, increasing the granularity of product visibility.
Founded in 1976, Washington-based Zak Designs sells its products in a variety of grocery chains, specialty stores, online channels and retailers such as Walmart, Amazon and Target.
