Integrated Product Development and Workflow can reduce the time to market and keep everyone in the product development team on the same page.  Workflows can help the team measure their performance, make sure nothing falls behind, and when it does, that it is taken care of.

• How do we keep everyone in the team on the same page? 
• How do we communicate effectively? 
• Can we shorten the product development cycle and make it more efficient? 

These are some of the questions that we were trying to answer when we designed the Product Development module. 

You can define the specs and the rest of the information that the manufacturer will need to manufacture your products.  You can add pictures, fabric detail information, swatches, and any other images or documents that you think are relevant. 

The revisions section allows you to record any relevant change, which becomes available to the whole team.  This is the key to the PDM module as it organizes what would probably be a set of unstructured e-mails, memos and faxes. 

You can organize your products into Workbooks or Collections and group them the way your salespeople will present them to the customer. 

You can also enter costing information and quotes from vendors, revisions to the costing (with revision history of costing and quote information).  You can define the costing categories (such as FOB price, fabric cost, trim cost, duty, freight, etc.) and your own formulas to calculate gross margin and other significant values for your analysis.