attune Consulting, a premier global solutions provider to the fashion and lifestyle industries, announced attune for Retail (a4R), a retail enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution designed specifically to solve the needs of fashion and lifestyle brands that operate their own retail stores.
With attune for Retail, fashion retailers can implement a tailored ERP system that supports their unique business requirements within weeks, not months – enabling them to quickly and cost-effectively gain the benefits of having a retail storefront to engage with target customers.
"attune has more than a decade of experience working exclusively with fashion and lifestyle companies to address their business and technology challenges," said Vajira De Silva, CEO of attune. "We understand their pain points and have packaged this expertise into attune for Retail – delivering an enterprise solution that is preconfigured to their needs and can be implemented quickly, at a much lower cost to the business."
Increasingly, fashion and lifestyle brands are establishing retail stores to sell direct to consumers, instead of working through multi-brand boutiques, department stores, or other third-party wholesalers.
The business benefits are compelling, including increased profit margins, greater control over how products are marketed and sold, and fostering a closer relationship with customers – a requirement for today's omnichannel shopper. However, the enormous costs and resources involved in running successful retail stores remain a barrier to success.
"Fashion retailers have unique requirements that impact everything from inventory management to the integration of next season's clothing line," said De Silva. "To date, addressing these needs has meant retooling core systems, which takes an enormous amount of time, money, and resources. attune for Retail has done the majority of work upfront to accelerate the process and eliminate these obstacles so customers can focus on what they do best – building their brands and running successful retail stores."
ERP Designed for Fashion and Lifestyle
attune for Retail offers solutions in the following areas, including:
-Empowering sales with attune Mobile Store – attune for Retail puts the power of mobility into the hands of the sales associate with attune Mobile Store, a mobile point of sale (POS) that integrates with any ERP system. Associates have instant access to all the customer data they need at their fingertips – including buying patterns, preferences, and recent online or store purchases. They can check inventory, place an order for home delivery, or message other store associates as needed. By extending the ERP to the mobile POS, fashion retailers can create a seamless customer experience that is critical to serving the needs of today's anytime, anywhere shopper.
-Delivering greater insight into retail operations – attune for Retail provides an expansive collection of industry-specific business intelligence (BI) reports not found in the standard SAP Retail solution that address the needs of fashion and lifestyle retailers. The reports, which can be accessed through the mobile POS, offer real-time insights into a full range of activities, including the status of merchandise during promotions, inventory aging, markdowns, product performance, consumer returns, and costs associated with moving product to outlets stores, among others.
-Extending the power of SAP Retail to fashion and lifestyle – attune for Retail comes preconfigured with best-in-class solutions that address the most important and common processes for fashion retailers, including assortment management and planning, merchandising, SAP AFS integration, and Open-to-Buy for planning seasonal merchandise. attune for Retail also provides more than 15 user-friendly, pre-built interfaces that connect SAP Retail to critical data from external systems, including customer, financial, sales, and article listing data – to name just a few.
