Kinco Selects Centric PLM for Heavy-Duty Gloves

Kinco, a glove manufacturing company, has selected Centric Software’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution. Centric Software provides enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source and sell products such as apparel, footwear, sporting goods, and more to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals, the company reports.

Based in Portland, OR, and founded in 1975, Kinco is a second-generation family-owned company that produces premium gloves designed for everything from gardening, to snowmobiling, to thermal work gloves. 

Nicholas Pai is in Purchasing and Sourcing at Kinco. He says, “Making gloves is surprisingly technical. Shoes have a standard size measurement for the interior of the shoe. Gloves can be trickier because each piece has to be hand sewn, which a lot of people don’t know.”

He goes on to explain that there are challenges in the materials used to make gloves. “There are simple cotton string knit gloves, nitrile and latex dipped gloves, leather gloves, and synthetic leather gloves. Finding consistency in sizing across the entire line is a challenge,” Pai says.

The company has up to 40 vendors. They make about 180 styles of gloves and have at least two suppliers for each style of glove in different countries to be prepared for disruptions.

“We source from six different countries,” Pai says. “We have to have shipment timings, production output timings, different Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) codes for different materials, and glove types.”

Pai says he felt that getting a PLM solution was inevitable. “I think that every company in our size range trying to grow kind of hits a point where you just have to use a PLM.”

Kinco searched for providers and in the process, interviewed and did demos with six suppliers. “In the end we went with Centric, because of its stability, its size, but also the really, really organized approach to onboarding,” Pai says. “Currently, everybody in sourcing feels like they’re drowning, especially with the troubles that we’re having this year with things out of our control. We really needed to have a partnership with a company where they shouldered some of the onboarding work to keep us on track, which is really important.”

Kinco expects numerous benefits from Centric PLM, like having all material and product information in one digital hub, but there were features that were non-negotiable.

“We decided on three main necessities that we had to have: a costing tool, a tech pack tool, and a vendor scoring system,” Pai says. “The Centric product is a great product, but I think the support Centric brings is better than every other company that I interviewed. And that was the selling feature for us specifically.”

Adds Chris Groves, president and CEO of Centric Software, “I am delighted that Kinco has chosen Centric. We are humbled by the kind words about our company that Nicholas Pai has expressed; we pride ourselves on providing the highest level of service. We work closely with each of our customers—due to input from partners like Kinco, all our version updates are market-driven and based on real-world situations.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.