When you're supporting a company that's growing 40% per year, there's no time to think, let alone squander months or years on an enterprise software deployment. So when Under Armour Inc., a leading brand of performance apparel and footwear, opted to replace a smattering of manual and outdated systems with an integrated product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, there was no question that the company would opt for a solution that was tailored specifically for apparel manufacturers' needs.

Sure, there were minor modifications to be made and some integration work to be done. Even so, Under Armour was up and running on Dassault Systemes' ENOVIA MatrixOne Apparel Accelerator in less than 20 weeks, far sooner than the year-to-18-month rollout schedule generally associated with most enterprise software deployments.

The ambitious timetable was critical, Under Armour officials say, to ensure that the PLM system would be in gear to generate efficiencies for the company's upcoming spring and fall 2009 seasons, which required planning to kick off in earnest in November 2007.

"We needed something that had an apparel maker's focus in mind. Otherwise we'd be spending too much time trying to tailor something else," says Rich Zielinski, Under Armour's vice president of technical services. "The more tailoring you do, the more a system doesn't work."

Companies in many industries are learning that lesson. Having lived through lengthy, expensive, and often fruitless enterprise software rollouts, especially in the areas of ERP and CRM, manufacturers are now reluctant to bankroll the deployment of generic PLM systems in need of major modifications for handling industry-specific requirements and company-specific business processes. They understand that, as the PLM market matures, much of the heavy lifting associated with mapping out critical business processes and industry requirements — for example, in the areas of regulatory compliance or quality management — has already been done by the vendors and early adopters in sectors such as automotive and aerospace and defense.

In lieu of starting from scratch, PLM newcomers want to capitalize on this wealth of best practice and industry domain expertise to jumpstart time-to-value. In addition, as companies in industries such as consumer packaged goods and retail and apparel step up to the PLM plate, they, too, are demanding out-of-the-box capabilities that lower total cost of ownership for the software.

"It helps companies deploy PLM faster if you can put it into the context of their industry," says Bill Boswell, senior director, Teamcenter product marketing, at Siemens PLM Solutions. "It helps if you can give users reports out of the box using the terms they're familiar with. It's all about lowering the cost of ownership, faster deployment, and faster time to value."

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Siemens PLM Solutions, like most PLM providers, has been busy over the past few years rounding out its vertical offering story. Initially, Siemens offered vertical versions of Teamcenter for aerospace and defense and the automotive industry — its traditional core markets — which essentially wrapped up many of the templates, workflows, reports, and domain expertise mapped out by marquee clients in these sectors and made them available to the PLM-buying public.

Because of growing demand for these industry-specific versions, Siemens branched out in 2005 with a packaged Teamcenter edition for Federal Drug Administration compliance, following up in the past year with packages for medical device makers and retail and apparel manufacturers.