SAP AG announces 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. “With this development, we plan to help our fashion customers become truly vertical,” said Lori Mitchell-Keller, global head, Industry Business Unit Retail, SAP. “As a result of this planned collaboration, we aim to bring the processes for vertical fashion wholesale, manufacturing and retail into one system using the power of our proven, Big Data-enabled business suite on SAP HANA.” “Our deep and innovative partnership with SAP will enable us to bring our global wholesale and retail businesses closer together,” said Jan Brecht, Group CIO, adidas. “We’re focused on taking our retail, wholesale and manufacturing businesses to a new level with our SAP collaboration,” said Dario Scagliotti, Group CIO, Luxottica. “The future looks very bright for our operations.” “Our innovation with SAP is intended to create a new single platform for speed and growth across our multiple businesses and distribution channels,” said Ludo Onnink, COO, Tommy Hilfiger. “We look forward to using these best practices to run faster than ever before.” SAP is working on several aspects of the new solution development with attune Consulting, a global solution and technology provider to the fashion and lifestyle industry. “Today’s fashion and lifestyle companies need a fully vertical in-memory solution,” said Vajira de Silva, CEO attune Consulting. “We are happy to support SAP in taking their industry leadership to the next level.” SAP will host a number of invite-only events with retailers and SAP executives at NRF, including a global media reception and a customer roundtable luncheon.
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