PLM for Fashion for Partners - collaborate directly with your suppliers

Product development is not a purely internal process. Suppliers must receive specifications, respond to sample requests, submit costs, and flag issues. Faster exchanges move the product forward more quickly.

When collaboration runs through email, problems occur. A supplier can use an outdated tech pack, a cost submission can arrive in an unstructured format, and a comment can be lost in a thread.

Partners users, such as supplier users, can work directly in PLM for Fashion as active participants instead of passive recipients. A supplier can sign in and view the products that are shared with them. A supplier can also respond to sample and quotation requests and submit test results within the same system that the internal team uses. You do not need to export, attach, or email content. The conversation and the product record stay in the same place.

Access is carefully controlled. Each partner is granted specific rights that define what the partner can see and do. External users are set up and managed through Infor External Entity Management (EEM). This setup keeps external users separated from internal users at the platform level. Once connected, a partner's users work within PLM with role-based views and purpose-built features for the supplier type.

The result is a supplier relationship that supports genuine collaboration instead of a series of output emails. The product record includes the audit trail and access controls that the development process requires.