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Interview with Kate Munro

Kate Munro
Kate Munro
VP-Marketing
Bamboo Rose
Bamboo Rose

We offer SMEs a rapid deployment industry model approach
Bamboo Rose is a leading multi-enterprise product and supply chain platform connecting the community to help retailers and suppliers bring great products to market faster, more efficiently and at higher margins. Bamboo Rose serves over 250,000 user members across 85 major retailers, 400 brands, 35,000 suppliers and service providers as they discover, develop, and deliver products @ digital speed. Kate Munro, Vice-President for Marketing, talks about the company's solutions for the textiles and apparel industry.

Tell us about the ERP/PLM solutions that your company offers. In what ways are they unique?

Bamboo Rose's retail Product Lifecycle Management Solution offers design, development, and testing of private label and branded merchandise. Our PLM enables retailers and suppliers to develop quality merchandise and reduce cycle times. Whether the design is done in-house, collaboratively with partners, or products are bought directly from suppliers, Bamboo Rose can support the simplest processes to the most sophisticated ones. We help you get the right products to market at the right time and at the right price. Our unique solution offers 20-50 per cent cycle time reduction with fewer manual tasks, one version of truth, and real time design and development collaboration and reduced sampling costs through standardised design elements and better visual communication of product requirements.
 

IT solutions are expensive, and often out of reach for SMEs that make up an overwhelmingly large chunk of the global fashion industry. Do you offer solutions for them as well?

Bamboo Rose offers SMEs a rapid deployment industry model approach. We have found that the barrier to entry has typically been in complex implementation approaches that take a long time and often overrun as requirements make a business rethink its needs throughout the project. Taking an industry model approach allows SMEs to rapidly deploy a broad functional platform that is proven to work, create a community who can benefit from the platform, and then have the flexibility to change and adapt processes after they are live. This minimises time to benefit while reducing project costs and change fatigue often experienced in traditional PLM deployments.

A fast-changing industry also means that the solutions need to stay abreast of the changes. How do you ensure this at your company?

Bamboo Rose has a dedicated innovation team that looks to future industry trends and technologies, to rapidly evaluate these and determine how they impact our solutions and clients. Within the solution deployments our clients often adopt new business processes in response to emerging opportunities and our flexible platform allows them to rapidly trial and scale at minimal cost. It used to take months to enter a new country or bring on a new franchisee, with Bamboo Rose it takes a few days.

Could you give us a few case studies of how your solutions have made a difference to companies in the fashion-apparel business?

Following a massive surge in customer growth, a leading home improvement retailer came to Bamboo Rose to help optimise its sourcing operations to deliver highly differentiated products to market as quickly as possible. Using the Bamboo Rose Marketplace solution, the buyer was able to initiate digital collaboration with suppliers earlier on in the sourcing process, resulting in increased product views, reduced costs, and overall efficiency throughout the buying cycle. With Bamboo Rose, the retailer saw 300 per cent more products year-over-year, a decrease in sampling-related costs by 85 per cent and 30 per cent reduced buying cycle length. (SG)
Published on: 06/11/2019

DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.