SAP

To start-off let us look at the history and characteristics of this industry which might have propelled development of this solution. We all know that Apparel & Footwear Industry is a highly challenging one where trends are created overnight and fashion changes are inevitable, leading to tremendous pressure on companies to efficiently synchronize the supply chain and related operations. Major companies are dealing with seasonal fluctuations, abundance of design and volatile demand, resulting in uncertain forecast, shortage of stocks etc. Another unique characteristic is that it is striving continuously to strike a balance between domestic production and global procurement, offshoot of which is an extremely complex operation, very difficult to manage and monitor. This is because, division of labor is today a common practice, through which companies in this industry aim to achieve substantial cost-cutting, by transferring production to low-cost countries. While critical activities like product development, raw material and finished goods requirements planning, production planning, and quality control are retained at the headquarters. Thus, with production sites being located around the world, supervision and monitoring of these have become difficult and expensive. This has also proved that information flow and collaboration among partners in the supply chain, is of paramount importance for eventual success.

SAP's Apparel and Footwear package is the ideal solution for the issues mentioned above, which caters to diverse business challenges, for example, managing huge volume of data arising from continuous design and seasonal variations, and handling vertical integration as manufacturers venture into retailing and retailers tread into production. To give you a brief idea, following are the three salient features of this package, which distinguishes it from standard SAP R/3, and probably makes it special:

Grids: This is the most important functionality of this module, which provides the capacity to handle sizes, and has been conceptualized keeping in mind the complexities involved in production, procurement, sales & distribution and materials management in an Apparel environment. This is defined in the system as Grids.

Seasonality: As mentioned earlier, season plays a very important role in the product life cycle of the apparel industry and planning and production carried out needs to be aligned with the demand of the individual seasons. Thus, this seasonality feature, which has been built into the Sales & Distribution Module of the AFS Solution is integrated together with the grid functionality described earlier, making the package more robust. Seasons also allows maintenance and storage of collections and themes for each season which help in further classification of the offering for a season and provides a concept for each category of product range.

Categories: Material master maintenance for this industry involves huge amount of data, for which concept of categories has evolved to logically segment materials. These categories are usually maintained in the AFS Industry based on the quality level, type of customer and regional requirements.

Thus we can conclude that to meet the unique wish-list of this industry, SAP AFS provides a system, which is simple to use, easy to maintain and highly flexible to accommodate future requirements, and also empowers all stakeholders to collaborate successfully.