Challenges in the Apparel Industry and SAP’s Solutions for them – Article 1:

By S.Suren

Challenges in the Apparel Industry and SAP's Solutions for them:

Optimizing service levels

Service levels with any industry is about servicing customer at a higher level than competitors to make them come back to you, and its no different with the apparel industry. Given the complexities of operating in a fashion conscious industry, with new fashion lines staying in stores for a week before they go out of fashion, it is only understandable on how much pressure the end retailers would have to go through, to service their customers and in turn the amount the pressure they would be passing on to their vendors to support them in maintaining a high service level.

Let’s look at how SAP AFS has been designed to help with this aspect:

Order scheduling Strategy is an additional process in AFS SD processing that helps to optimize the delivery dates for each item. You can define rules to take account of special customer requests or general business requirements.

Distribution Rules – This way you can decide on how to fulfill the multi store orders of your important customers.

Value-Added Services – Using this function in SAP AFS you can add those services or products to the final product that is being delivered to the customer as per the customer’s requirement. By having a clear cut strategy with the value additions made to the product, it helps identifying each operation that go into delivering the value added service and charging a identifiable price for it.

Multi-Store Order – Using this function you can satisfy the requirements of you large corporate customers who have multiple stores with individual requirements for different stores.

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Streamlining operations for efficiency

It is a known fact that the logistics operation involved with the apparel industry is one of the most complex and longest sequence of networked operations, given this it is extremely important that valuable time, money and effort is not used in sorting out issues resulting from operating with a such a complicated chain. Hence it is important that you have the right tools and practices built in the chain to make sure issues are highlighted and sorted out at the earliest.

Lean Warehouse Management - Use of reduced functionality of the warehouse management (WM) in simply structured warehouses without inventory management in storage bins.

Source Allocation – This tool is to optimize your procurement activities. As a supplier/recipient relation it supports the control and organization of your business-related and interenterprise procurement structures.

Vendor Capacity Planning – its just so common in this industry where you work with vendors who are located far away from your operating plants. In this case every transaction with them is extremely important in relation to the time and cost involved in procurements reaching its destination. This is where vendor capacity planning really helps this industry.

More on this post to follow soon. Hope you found this informative and interesting. Your comments and suggestions are welcome at ssurenlk@msn.com.

Have a nice day !!