IBM and Fashion Research Institute Partner for PLM

IBM announced today that it had signed a multi-million dollar IBM Global Business Services agreement with the Fashion Research Institute (FRI) for a product life-cycle management system based in Second Life and OpenSim.  FRI currently holds Shengri-La, a five-island complex in Second Life, and an OpenSim complex with an aim towards reducing the environmental impact of the fashion industry. The new system, which will go live in the second half of 2009, will be a pilot program with 20 international design houses and is ultimately planned as an enterprise offering targeting design houses around the world.

The initial agreement was signed in March 2008 and expanded in August  to include consumer package design. Fashion and package designers will be able to use 3D tools in Second Life and OpenSim to collaboratively test designs as well as workflow systems.

The IBM-backed and FRI co-developed solution promises to provide product samples and factory specifications to design mass production systems in the real world. The goal is that by allowing everything from design to prototyping to be handled virtually, designers can cut sample costs by up to 2/3.

"As the Fashion Research Institute continues to enhance the IT capabilities of the fashion and consumer packaged goods industries, IBM's deep knowledge in product design, enterprise systems, and virtual worlds will help FRI bring new market opportunities to the fashion world," said Jeffrey Russell, IBM Global Business Services. "A design house implementing this solution could reduce dozens of weeks of design time, minimize the number of physical samples manufactured, and increase product manufacturing quality enough to put into development and production many additional collections."

Comments

[William Oliver Glascoe III]

I really hope the vision includes the clothiers providing royalty-free 3D models of the garments at the point of sale for the physical (real) garments to the customer so s/he can dress their 3D body scans with "mirrored" clothes. I suggest leveraging the X3D graphics ISO/IEC standards to implement this.