SAP brings best practices back into fashion

NEW YORK, USA: SAP AG announced plans to collaborate with key customers to better meet the challenges faced by apparel, footwear and accessory companies.

Working with adidas, Luxottica and Tommy Hilfiger, SAP envisions bringing a new fashion solution to the marketplace that will better enable fashion brands to manufacture their products and sell them to retailers and consumers using one single, vertical solution. The announcement was made at the NRF 103rd Annual Convention and EXPO, being held January 12-15 at the Javits Convention Center in New York City.

Fashion companies strive to be customer-centric by using best practices and Big Data in a cross-channel vertical environment. Wholesalers and manufacturers that run retail stores and have direct-to-consumer (D2C) Web channels may keep inventories in disintegrated silos, leading to issues in stock and distribution decisions. It can also mean new styles are not brought to market quickly enough, and moving into new markets and channels is cumbersome and time-consuming.

The planned single Big Data-enabled solution is envisioned to give fashion companies a unified view of inventory. And with the power of in-memory computing, large data volumes can be quickly analyzed for a fast and accurate overview of products. This is expected to save both time and money across operations.

The collaboration aims to enable retailers to meet these challenges and manage the vertical, omni-channel business processes across one Big Data system landscape for greater efficiency, quicker time to market and better inventory control, so retailers can grow globally.