attune Helps Luxury Brand Implement

SAP Fashion Management to

Augment Omni-channel Capabilities

CASE STUDY
3 Introduction

4 Business Challenge

6 How attune Helped

7 Gaining Omni-Channel Visibility Across the Value Chain

| 2
Introduction

The luxury brand is an international fashion house, which

operates multiple product lines - outerwear, fashion Technologies involved:
accessories, fragrances, sunglasses, and cosmetics - through
• SAP Fashion Management (FMS)
214 mainline stores, 213 concessions within department • SAP S/4HANA Finance
stores, digital commerce and 57 outlets around 30 countries. • SAP Customer Activity Repository (CAR)
• SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP)
attune helped this international luxury brand with an ambitious • SAP Planning for Retail (P4R)
plan, aimed at re-engineering core business processes and • Hybris
• Ariba
upgrading its existing ERP systems with SAP Fashion
Management, the new vertical solution created in partnership
by SAP and attune. How attune helped:

This comprehensive solution, which is currently being • POC development

deployed, merges wholesale, retail and e-commerce • Strategy & roadmap development
operations onto one single system for real-time visibility across • Unparalleled knowledge in best practices
in the fashion & lifestyle industry
the entire enterprise. This ensures a single pool of inventory
• Expertise in SAP FMS, S/4HANA, CAR,
across digital, retail and wholesale - empowering the fashion Hybris, IBP, and P4R
brand to enable multiple omni-channel functionalities. • Consulting & implementation

| 3
Business Challenge
The company has been successful in shifting its operating
model towards the retail channel with a relentless focus on
customer-centricity and operational excellence. As a result,
the company sought to broaden its focus on improving and
optimising all routes to market - both online and offline, owned
and third-party, with a clear emphasis on enhancing retail
productivity and service.
The company knew it needed to invest in core technical
infrastructure and improved business processes to overcome
challenges, and maintain its impressive growth trajectory and
rapid international expansion. Some of the challenges were:
• Numerous processes were performed “off system” in a
non-standard manner, which were not as effective and
efficient as they needed to be. The company recognized
that achieving its aggressive growth targets required
implementing best processes across several areas of the
business.
• The company was operating two separate ERP systems
- one for retail and another for wholesale. Large volumes
of segmented data was generated, limiting any effort to
gain complete visibility across the business, resulting in
data redundancies and inconsistencies.
• The company realized that online and in-store systems
needed to work together to create a seamless
experience wherever customers encountered the brand,
which current systems could not offer. This model of
integrating online and offline inventory is an intense focus
for the next phase of the company in order to improve
product availability and fulfillment options online and
in-store, as well as to meaningfully reduce delivery times
and supply imbalances.
• With digital commerce continuing to increase in
importance and luxury consumers become increasingly
mobile and global, the company wanted to continue
investing in digital commerce, specifically customer
insight and analytics to better understand the core luxury
consumer for improved retail and sales productivity - on
line and in-stores. As a result, merchandising activities
needed to be refined to provide customers with a clearer
and more compelling product assortment offering.
| 4
 • The company plans to further evolve its footprint and
positioning in both developed and emerging markets.
Challenged with finding new sources of growth in an Objectives
increasingly competitive uncertain environment, the
• Uncover new opportunities in retail, products and processes
company realized that it needed information and timely
• Find new sources of growth by evaluating the financial
insights to evaluate the financial implications of the
implications of the business
business, influence decisions, and take practical, timely
• Standardize processes across several areas of the business
action - whether it is to introduce a new product or to
• Improve integration across wholesale, retail and e-commerce
analyze the financial report of e-commerce channels.
• Gain one view of global inventory across all channels
• Achieve better analytics and customer insights for improved
The company decided to launch a program to improve customer experiences
excellence across its operations and uncover new
opportunities in retail, products and processes. This initiative
underpinned the company’s agenda to support its growth
ambitions, with investments made to upgrade the company’s
core IT systems and replace the existing ERP systems with a
cutting-edge SAP solution - enabling the company to improve
its flexibility, speed to market, stock visibility and overall
business performance.

To help manage the implementation, the company looked

to partner with a technology solutions provider that brought
deep SAP implementation skills, process know-how, industry
knowledge and proven experience in helping fashion
companies transform their operations. attune, the
co-innovation partner of SAP FMS, already had strong
relationship with the company and was selected as a partner
to spearhead this initiative.

| 5
How attune Helped
Our team of experts worked closely with the company to carry
out the luxury brand’s ambitious plan to drive greater efficiency
and productivity throughout the global business. The project
was complex, with many moving parts, involving core softwares
such as SAP FMS with S/4HANA Finance, SAP Customer
Activity Repository, Hybris, SAP Planning for Retail, SAP
Integrated Business Planning and Ariba.
attune first started with a Proof of Concept for one of the
business divisions, taking some key processes and replaying
them on SAP FMS. The road map was developed to balance the
change impact on the business with its strategic ambitions as its
existing solutions were heavily customized, making it difficult to
move to SAP FMS. The geographical scope was organized
under three regions: US, EMEA and Asia with the main
distribution hubs in US, UK, Italy, HK, Netherlands and China.
Alongside this push for greater productivity, the company also
decided to drive greater end-to-end control across their supply
chain, merchandising, marketing, and omni-commerce
management. In this regard, the following initiatives were
undertaken:
• Strategised and developed a plan to re-platform the
company’s e-commernce systems onto Hybris technology
with SAP CAR. This way, all digital and physical customer
touchpoints would be integrated onto a single platform –
including online, mobile, point-of-sale, call center, social
media and print to create contextual, personalized and
relevant customer experiences that boost loyalty and
increase sales
• SAP Integrated Business Planning for unified planning
across sales, operations, demand, inventory, and supply
including a supply chain control tower for dashboard
analytics and monitoring
• Ariba to help trading partners get real-time information to
make faster, better decisions while collaborating to cut costs
and risks
• SAP Planning for Retail for a centralized repository that can
support planning activities, including efforts to reconcile
merchandising strategies. This way, the company can use
real-time demand-driven forecasts, common data, and KPIs
to develop end-to-end retail plans - quickly and easily
• SAP S/4HANA Finance for a common view of all financial
and operational data to instantly evaluate the financial
implications of business options with real-time analytics,
prediction, and simulation
| 6
Gaining Omni-Channel Visibility Across the Value Chain
With attune’s help, the company developed a new set of
capabilities that supports its growth agenda. Specifically, these
capabilities are helping the luxury brand to:
• Develop effective omni-channel programs backed by a single
global inventory holding for retail, wholesale, and
e-commerce channels that span business divisions and
countries
• View real-time inventory availability within one system for
easier retail planning and execution
• Respond to unexpected situations in sales channels and retail
spaces faster with greater flexibility. If, for example, an online
shop has an abundance of a certain product, stock levels can
be adjusted across channels according to demand, and in real
time
• Develop better assortment plans with more relevant products
for customers
• Deliver analysis and share alerts of real-time information
across the end-to-end supply and demand network, with the
speed of SAP HANA platform
• Drive massive IT simplification with an architecture that
removes replications and aggregates and eliminates many
of the manual processes involved in planning end-to-end
retail lifecycles
• Use one common view of all information across finance to
identify the best strategic financial options
• Use business insights and automated processes to improve
product forecasting, resulting in more appropriate allocations
of merchandise to stores
• Achieve better transparency, consistency and quality of
business information to guide decision-making and reduce
overall supply chain costs
• Gain one single view of the customer to target and create
contextual, personalized and relevant customer experiences
that boost loyalty and increase sales, wherever customers are
• Analyze market insights to anticipate new trends and re-plan
critical retail channels
| 7
Demo: Go Truly Omni-channel with attune
At attune, we work
exclusively with Fashion
& Lifestyle companies; helping
brands deliver superior
customer experiences in
the digital age.
Schedule a Demo
WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT:
Omni-Channel Essentials with SAP FMS
Take a guided tour of SAP FMS omni-channel
capabilities and learn how SAP Fashion Management
powers multiple omni-channel functionalities with
speed and ease.
Pre-configured SAP FMS on the Cloud
See how you can deploy SAP Fashion Management
at a fraction of the time and cost with a pre-configured
solution.
Omni-channel Order Management Engine
Re-imagine the possibilities of retail with attune’s
omni-channel rules engine on SAP FMS; designed to
enable seamless order management and fulfillment
methods.
Our Services

Consulting Services For more information, visit

Delivering proven consulting on business technology for Fashion and www.attuneconsulting.com
Lifestyle companies

Technology Services /attune.global

Providing solutions and accelerators built on deep industry expertise
covering Mobility, HANA, Cloud, ERP, Big Data and Analytics @attune_Global

Business Transformation Services /company/attune

Aligning stakeholder engagement, organizational readiness and business
models to embrace technology adoption and ensure smooth transition /user/attuneConsulting

Managed Services
Managing technology investments with proven methodologies and
specialized knowledge

About Us
attune is a team of trusted business technology advisors
who work with fashion and lifestyle brands to transform their
business performance. attune offers services across the
fashion and lifestyle value chain, developing solutions that
maximize competitive advantage, integrate and transform
activities across people, processes and technology.

Copyright © 2016 attune Lanka (Private) Limited. All rights reserved.

| 9