Fashion and Apparel

Fashion and Apparel is an expanding sector globally and is an important vertical for SAP. The fashion industry deals with extreme seasonality with trends changing throughout the year. Products are often multi-dimensional (size, material, and colors) causing a huge impact on supply chain and inventory management as well as pricing, merchandizing and digital storefronts.

For fashion companies, this means leveraging a platform that connects across all sales channels – wholesale, retail, manufacturing and e-commerce, empowering decision-making and giving you a significant advantage in today’s digital economy. Successful companies aim for a single source of truth and advanced analytics to drive decision making and performance.

SAP and partner solutions in fashion and apparel

Fashion and Apparel is an expanding sector globally and is an important vertical for SAP. The fashion industry deals with extreme seasonality with trends changing throughout the year. Products are often multi-dimensional (size, material, and colors) causing a huge impact on supply chain and inventory management as well as pricing, merchandizing and digital storefronts.

For fashion companies, this means leveraging a platform that connects across all sales channels – wholesale, retail, manufacturing and e-commerce, empowering decision-making and giving you a significant advantage in today’s digital economy. Successful companies aim for a single source of truth and advanced analytics to drive decision making and performance.

SAP and partner solutions in fashion and apparel

SAP S/4HANA Fashion is a comprehensive ERP solution, designed to help fashion businesses meet the demands of the digital and global marketplace. It allows fashion companies to manage the entire fashion process ranging from wholesale, retail, manufacturing and e-commerce through a single platform. The fashion platform allows retailers the flexibility and agility needed to deliver seamless customer experiences and adapt to rapidly changing customer requirements. It also provides reporting capabilities in real time, by function, region, category, channel and product.

Additional examples of scenarios where SAP and partner products help are:

  1. Stock protection helps companies achieve this goal by protecting inventory for high priority demand even if important sales orders are received late and low priority orders precede them.
  2. Backorder processing enables available-to-Promise (ATP), a function provided to help fashion businesses confirm order delivery dates based on actual supply chain and manufacturing resources.
  3. Flexible fulfillment and order orchestration by providing inventory availability to sales associates so that associates are able to view item availability at nearby stores and source intelligently from another store to fulfill in-store customer orders for out-of-stock products.

Key Considerations for SAPinsiders:

Several fashion and apparel companies have achieved significant benefits through SAP and partner solutions.

  • Case Study: Why Real-Time Analytics? Think Swimsuits. Read this case study on how apparel companies can be nimble despite drastically changing demand using SAP HANA driven analytics.
    • Case study: Columbia Sportswear Connects Active People with Their Passions Faster Than Ever Before. Learn insights from this case study on how Columbia Sportswear moved to SAP Apparel and Footwear, and used automation software to speed and simplify data conversion.

737 results

  1. Wipro’s Sustainable Fashion Rental Solution

    Published: 24/July/2023

    Reading time: 4 mins

    Wipro’s Fashion Rental Solution is a prime example of how innovation can drive business growth. This solution addresses the increasing demand for sustainable products while creating new revenue streams and embracing a circular-economy business model. The fashion and retail industries face the pressing problem of massive clothing waste with 92 million tons of clothing ending…

  2. Wipro’s Sustainable Fashion Rental Solution

    Published: 08/September/2023

    Reading time: 4 mins

    We’ve always believed that innovation is a leading driver of business growth, and technology powers innovation. Most of the new innovations comes with a plethora of complex requirements, like real-time prediction, seamless integration of structured and unstructured data, and the need to support social, ecological and government regulations. These are solutions that bring in process…

  3. Scale Up in Retail with SAP’s SCM 4.1 Inventory Collaboration Hub

    Published: 01/July/2005

    Reading time: 11 mins

    Although it was first introduced with SCM 4.0, few users have leveraged SAP Inventory Collaboration Hub (SAP ICH) to take control of large inventories in numerous locations. Those in retail and other industries with such requirements will find they can manage large operations more easily. Key Concept SAP ICH is heralded as SAP’s strategic supply...…

  4. Crocs Climbs New Business Heights

    Published: 06/July/2015

    Reading time: 7 mins

    Crocs revenue surged between 2005 to 2007, and the footwear retailer and manufacturer's highly customized legacy IT systems were not ideal to keep up with the company's growth. To sustain the expected success, Crocs realized it needed a systems landscape that could mature with the company, and it embarked on Project Sunlight, which included an…

  5. Lessons Learned from Delivering an SAP Omnichannel Point-of-Sale by GK

    Published: 01/July/2020

    Reading time: 6 mins

    To keep up with customer expectations, retail stores must offer a tailored and optimized experience. To achieve this, one US-based apparel company set out to build an integrated point-of-sale (POS) system that, once completed, will help the company gain a competitive edge by offering customers highly flexible promotions, unlimited loyalty campaigns, and a mobile solution.…

  6. How to Reduce the Bullwhip Effect by Following a Demand-Driven Supply Chain Strategy

    Published: 08/June/2016

    Reading time: 26 mins

    Learn how to integrate consumer demand signals to achieve a demand-driven supply chain that is used to optimize short-term forecasts and increase demand network visibility. From a demand planning perspective, planners can now compare the traditional consensus demand forecasts with a point-of-sale (POS) statistical forecast and therefore apply corrections based on true consumer demand. From...…

  7. Catching up with SAP CTO Björn Goerke

    Published: 07/November/2018

    Reading time: 14 mins

    Dion Hinchcliffe (DH), Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research Bjorn Goerke (BG), SAP Chief Technology Officer and President, SAP Cloud Platform Dion Hinchcliffe: Hello, and welcome to SAPinsider. We have Bjorn, CTO with SAP with us. Bjorn, glad to have you with us. Bjorn Goerke: Thank you. Thanks for having me. DH: SAP is…

  8. Moving Average Price: Learn How It Functions in Project Stock and Figure Out How to Explain the Unexplainable

    Published: 17/January/2013

    Reading time: 81 mins

    A lot can go wrong if you don’t understand moving average price. Sort out the complexities that arise when material movements, invoices, reversals, and purchase order history interact with moving average price. Understand both the cause and the cure for the frustration and confusion. Key Concept Materials that are entered into an SAP system as...…

  9. What You Should Know About the SD Higher-Level Item Category’s Influence on Financial Reports

    Published: 15/March/2003

    Reading time: 10 mins

    The item category of a sales document primarily controls how the sales item is processed within SD. However, some of the settings have a significant influence on the FI module. The “higher-level” and “lower-level” item category relationships in a sales order are among the most commonly misunderstood settings in R/3. You might think that the...…

  10. How Burton Snowboards Remains as Nimble as Its Riders

    Published: 01/April/2011

    Reading time: 13 mins

    SAP S/4HANA offers enterprises tremendous potential to go beyond performance and simplicity and deliver significant business value as part of an enterprise-wide digital transformation, but this approach must be understood, considered and incorporated into by SAP and Partners SAPinsider - 2006 (Volume 7), January (Issue 1) by SAP and Partners SAPinsider - 2006 (Volume 7),…