Business

Enabling A Fashion Enterprise With A Digital Core

An Accelerated Approach to Implementing SAP FMS

In the fashion world, fulfilling customer orders as promised is vital. In fact, it can make or break a customer's loyalty to a brand. The omni-channel demands that companies are facing are driving significant change in this segment. Consider this: When the inventory of a SKU lives in a specific channel (like the web for example) but it's needed by a retail store or wholesale customer, how quickly can you satisfy channel demand while also delivering to meet your customer's expectation?

Connecting multiple systems and then batching/ exporting/uploading/syncing data will fall short in terms of reaction time to deliver on your customer promise. Companies will need one system of record on a real-time platform in the cloud with one view across all inventories, regardless of channel. This will enable that inventory can be best used in the right channel as needed, and that all channel owners and stakeholders will have full visibility to all inventory for better decision making and a consistent brand experience. Multiple sales channels can act as one with common global business processes to unify siloed, multi-channel inventory and business units.

To help fashion companies address this challenge, Capgemini's FashionPath solution, built on the SAP Fashion Management Solution (FMS) and SAP S/4HANA with S4 HANA Simple Finance, helps establish a digital core for businesses, bringing together data into a single system to accelerate the speed-to-decision process. The result? Companies can react more quickly and profitably to new opportunities, ever-faster fashion cycles, inventory issues and changing routes to market.

FashionPath is a robust, cost-effective solution that delivers all the benefits of SAP, customised for the fashion industry to meet the segment's unique business needs. Capgemini's accelerated deployment approach draws upon many years of experience - not just in implementing SAP but also in enabling fashion retailers to achieve their strategic objectives in highly competitive environments.

Leveraging both SAP's and Capgemini's global fashion industry real-world experience, FashionPath starts out pre-configured and ready for deployment. It is designed for both rapid return on investment and for improvements over time to help you realise greater value. A small- to medium-sized company may select "out of the box" elements of FashionPath to begin exploiting the advantages of SAP immediately. A larger fashion company can use FashionPath as a visioning platform: a way to exploit the embedded leading practices to reach a desired "to be" environment more efficiently and effectively.

FashionPath helps improve digital core business processes and enables the delivery of more accurate, reliable, and timely information to users throughout the enterprise; it's this information that is needed for cross-functional collaboration across wholesale, retail and web, brand management, sourcing and procurement, multi-channel inventory management, supply chain operations, and overall enterprise management.

Capgemini presented FashionPath solution to the Apparel, Footwear and Fashion Special Interest Group (AFF SIG) at the SAPPHIRE NOW event, recently. The Capgemini team discussed the benefits of allocation and inventory utilisation and distributed order management in an SAP FMS environment as well as key accelerators built into the FashionPath solution, such as a global organisational model, business process enablement, tools and templates.