Dainese Selects Centric PLM To Streamline Quality, Safety & Compliance
Leading Italian sports safety manufacturer Dainese has selected Centric Software®’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution to create a single point of collaboration for all product development processes. 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.
Dainese was founded in 1972 by Lino Dainese, a 24-year-old motorcycle enthusiast, who went on to design the first technical motorcycle racing suit for the legendary racer Giacomo Agostini. The company’s core commitment to performance and safety has gone beyond motorcycle clothing to encompass durable and stylish safety gear for alpine skiing, mountain biking, horse riding, competitive sailing and ultimately to outer space with products such as a gravity load simulation suit for the International Space Station (ISS).
Although the artisanal crafting traditions present in Dainese’s designs go back centuries, the company needed to innovate and modernize to keep pace with developments in dynamic sports safety technologies.
“When you walk into the room where people are sewing a suit for Valentino Rossi, you smell the leather and you see the craftsmanship, it's priceless… the most important challenge we face in our day-to-day work is to balance this unique heritage with the need to evolve, keeping aligned to our values and to our DNA,” says Luca Menegardo, CIO at Dainese. “We produce apparel, helmets, shoes, ski garments, motorcycle and bike racing garments, as well as electronics (with our D-air technology). Quality and compliance are at the center of what we do. We have strict protocols and very clear regulations we need to comply with.”
Dainese decided to switch to a centralized PLM platform in order to effortlessly facilitate compliance with safety regulations across different teams, as well as boosting collaboration. Their selection process was thorough, including a careful evaluation of the marketplace and multiple reference calls. After running several on-site workshops, Centric PLM rose to the top as the clear choice, due to its ability to centralize all information in one digital space, therefore eliminating thousands of spreadsheets and other disperse offline files as well as reducing time spent searching for up-to-date product data.
“We were coming from a situation where work was pretty fragmented… our Product Manager was working in systems such as PowerPoint and Excel, then sharing with the Design team, but this was all happening offline,” says Menegardo.
Roberto Conte, Project Manager at Dainese elaborates, “The real challenge was to have a structured, common platform, acting as a database rather than just spreadsheets or an offline repository. Centric PLM will cover this need.”
“A helmet takes almost three years to get from an idea to the market, versus apparel which has pretty much a one-year product development lifecycle,” Menegardo continues. "The same helmet needs to comply with one certification for Asia, one for Europe, one for the U.S., one for MotoGP and so on. Then there is additional homologation for each size, so it’s very complex.”
Dainese expects that combining all of their product data into one comprehensive, easy-to-use online solution will greatly simplify the iteration process for new products, giving design and production teams instant access to accurate data and compliance information, as well as visibility into other teams’ activities. This will ensure the production of safe products that meet international compliance standards before delivery to customers.
“We have been very happy with the support received so far from the Centric team, as well as the project set up. I believe that Centric PLM is going to make our lives much easier because there will be less back and forth, everything will be much more rotondo, as we say in Italian. It’s not going to be scattered, it’s going to be more streamlined and flawless,” concludes Menegardo.
“We are delighted to welcome Dainese to the Centric Software family and look forward to enabling them to produce products which are beautifully crafted, highly technical and compliant with the latest worldwide safety standards,” comments Chris Groves, President and CEO of Centric Software.
Dainese is dedicated to producing the most effective safety solutions in every arena where athletes continually push the human body and mind to surpass their prior achievements. A pioneer in combining the highest safety and maximum ergonomics, their products offer solutions for motorcyclists, alpine skiing and mountain biking and their special projects range from competitive sailing to outer space gear.
In its 49 years of activity, Dainese has created a constant flow of rule-breaking, standard-defining innovation in the most diverse fields of human endeavor, inventing key safety concepts such as the back protector, racing sliders, aerodynamic humps, as well as the first ever wearable airbag for motorcyclists and skiers, a technology that the brand has mastered in over 30 years of wearable safety airbags leadership. Additional special projects range from the first performance suit for sailing and yacht racing that combines flotation, protection and communication functions in a single solution, to a gravity load simulation suit for the International Space Station.
Like all their innovations, they’ve been developed in close collaboration with their pioneering users, designed around their needs to fully support their achievements. Or – to put it another way – they are inspired by humans.
