Meeting Customer Demand: How a Workwear Retailer Streamlined Operations with SAP S/4HANA® Fashion
This Workwear Retailer is a 130+ year old brand known for its rugged, long-lasting workwear apparel and footwear. Famed for its quality, durability, and innovation, people ranging from construction workers to farmers to a-list stars rely on this retailer.
Growing due to increasing popularity, this retailer decided to transform their technology and the processes it enabled. After researching options, they took a major transformation step by replacing its heavily customized SAP AFS with a stable, scalable SAP S/4HANA platform.
The company wanted to provide a frictionless shopping experience for customers, ensuring there was no downtime or negative impacts on business. However, the technology upgrade occurred during the pandemic, causing the company to rapidly shift to a remote project implementation.
Overcoming Challenges with a Modern Digital Core
As SAP AFS approached end-of-life, the company recognized its limitations in scalability and digital agility. Migrating to SAP S/4HANA Fashion enabled the business to overcome these constraints and support omnichannel growth.
The company chose SAP S/4HANA for Fashion and Vertical Business to underpin its transformation from multichannel to omnichannel and address business challenges:
- Integration: The company was evolving its traditional wholesale business model by integrating online sales and retail stores to increase its direct sales and this required an integrated IT core across the company. Their current SAP Apparel and Footwear Solution (AFS) hampered their omnichannel strategy, leading to constrained business growth.
- Lack of scalability: A multitude of customized and disparate systems couldn’t sustain the company’s growth, limiting operational efficiency. The current SAP AFS system was fast approaching its end-of-life and proved difficult to upgrade and perform regression testing while maintaining a stable core. The company required a solution that would provide a stable core while simultaneously rolling out new innovations.
- Inventory management: The company struggled to manage cross-channel inventory due to lack of visibility, leading to stock inconsistencies and fulfillment delays.
- Process optimization: The company needed to redesign its workflows to improve efficiency and enhance collaboration between associates, suppliers, and customers while driving better business performance.
Business Case for SAP S/4HANA
Rapid Growth
Rapid growth and marketplace disruption meant they needed a flexible backend with omnichannel capabilities. With S/4HANA, the company now has a single, vertically integrated platform for wholesale and retail, enabling omnichannel processes and services.
Power Innovation with a Stable Core
The legacy system was fast approaching its end-of-life. S/4HANA provided a future-proof architecture that could accommodate the company’s existing plans and their long-term business goals. They are now able to roll out innovations without impacting the core ERP.
Digital Capabilities
To face the current market realities, the company needed a platform that provided robust digital capabilities. SAP S/4HANA provided a digital core with the ability to extend and expand as business requirements evolve.
Complete Integration
The company wanted to unify information across operations. S/4HANA provided complete integration with merged data from all departments, functions, and operations.
Customer Point of View
Industry Know-how and Technical Expertise
“From early on, we appreciated Rizing’s ability to create meaningful relationships with the project team. Rizing’s technical infrastructure and architecture experience was apparent as they consistently partnered with our infrastructure team to ensure there were no blockers that impacted the business’s momentum.
They took pride in their work and went above and beyond to help us stay on track. We are immensely proud of our collective ability to deliver this project on time, especially given the fact we were entirely remote for the last 4-5 months, which is quite frankly, incredible.”
Director of Project Catalyst
The Value of an SAP S/4HANA Digital Core
Single Platform :
Merge retail, manufacturing and wholesale data in a single system with tight integration to related systems, such as CRM, PLM, etc.
Data Aggregation:
Enterprise-wide access to a single source of truth for decision-making in real-time
Extend and Innovate:
Flexible, scalable, and agile system supporting current and future needs. Enables starting businesses in shortest possible time
Inventory Management:
A fully connected system providing real-time visibility into inventory to minimize excessive inventory, costs, and write-offs and enable fulfillment options
Merchandising:
Provides key processes around merchandising, which can be managed together with wholesale and manufacturing processes for a complete view of products, labels, inventory, and stores
Manufacturing:
Manage fashion-specific manufacturing functionality including production control workbench, master orders, marker, feasibility analysis, and collective orders
Omni commerce Customer Experience:
Provides functionality to support in-store, online, mobile commerce, customer order management, omnichannel customer insights, and personalization.
The Outcome
The retailer used Rizing’s Future Reference Solution (FRS) to build the blueprint, which helped migrate from SAP AFS to SAP S/4HANA Fashion. This fit-for-purpose SAP S/4HANA for Fashion solution served as a working prototype, helping the company review desired future processes and build a better design template. Multiple workshops were organized to build a design template.
The Future Reference Solution (FRS) is based on Fashion Suite, which accelerated the build process once the detailed design was complete. The solution was implemented across retail and wholesale operations including 30+ retail stores. The next phase of the project includes the roll-out across its manufacturing operations and the integration of eCommerce.
The company believes further investment in digital technologies is a winning strategy that will also provide a fantastic experience for customers.
- Accelerated Blueprint and Design Foundation
The company conducted a detailed gap analysis to identify and prioritize high-level solution gaps, enabling a more targeted blueprint. A working template was used to assess the Level of Fit for SAP S/4HANA Fashion, validating its suitability for the brand’s needs. - Digitized Retail Operations
We successfully established retail operations on S/4HANA for improved merchandise management and digitized store operations with mobile-enabled apps, eliminating manual tasks with automated processes. - Improved Processes
The solution captures, manages, and analyzes data at unprecedented speeds, backed by standardized and integrated processes all captured in one SAP system.
This improves both the speed and quality of business process execution, decreasing overall operational costs.
The solution manages processes with a global ownership view that helps the company increase performance, lower costs, and gain more meaningful business insight. - Simplified IT
The final solution provides a simpler IT landscape and business processes. It helps manage and execute all core processes in a common IT footprint – lowering TCO. - Consolidated Solution for Wholesale and Retail
We implemented a single vertically integrated platform across their wholesale and retail channels, enabling omni-channel business processes and services. - Real-time Inventory Management
We created a single view of inventory to optimize stock sourcing and allocation which reduces stock-outs, lost sales, and excess inventories.
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