Centric Software®, the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) market leader, has announced that global discount retailer ALDI SOUTH is partnering with Centric Software to advance their digital transformation, support data driven decision making and further enhance international collaboration. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, price and sell products to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.
Founded in 1961, ALDI SOUTH is a global discount grocery retailer with 7,100 stores in 11 countries, including Australia, Germany, UK, USA and China, on four continents. Stores offer a core range of food products, including regional goods, organic and fresh produce, and other non-food consumer goods with a predominant focus on carefully selected private-label. These are complemented by weekly rotating themed special buys and seasonal items. ALDI SOUTH has thousands of suppliers, including many that are local to specific regions.
After an intensive vendor selection process, ALDI SOUTH selected Centric Software to provide a category range management solution to support international collaboration on range and product development. ALDI SOUTH will implement Centric PLM™, Centric Software’s flagship market-leading PLM solution, and Centric Visual Boards™, an innovative visual collaboration platform that extends the capabilities of PLM to transform the go-to-market process for multi-category retail.
“Centric Software stands out for their expertise and the user-friendly interface of their solutions,” explains Simon Weil, Managing Director Global Business Coordination at ALDI SOUTH and adds, “Centric solutions are a great fit for our customer focused assortment and the teams that will use the software, from buying, planning, merchandising and branding, to sourcing including suppliers who will also use the system.”
“Centric’s tools support our goal of streamlining the buying process for food, near-food and non-food so that we can offer our customers the best possible products at the lowest possible prices,” states Christian Gillmann, Group Director International IT at ALDI SOUTH. “We are striving for a strong partnership and a collaborative innovation ahead, with the goal of elevating the capabilities of the software.”
The broader digital transformation allows ALDI SOUTH to respond rapidly to changing consumer behaviour and improve time to market for new products and services, meet compliance, sustainability and quality goals, and drive cost leadership via improved efficiency and collaboration.
ALDI SOUTH plans to integrate Centric Software’s solutions with several other enterprise systems such as ERP and PIM, and manage functions, including elements of quality assurance and sustainability, on a global scale.
“We are very excited to announce our partnership with ALDI SOUTH,” says Fabrice Canonge, President of Centric Software. “ALDI SOUTH is a global leader in the discount grocery retail space, with ambitious plans to streamline their operations in a long-term strategic way. We are proud to provide the tools that will enable ALDI SOUTH to achieve those goals. We look forward to a productive and mutually beneficial relationship.”
