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 !!

On Demand not so much in Demand ??

By : S.Suren

There has been much speculation over the demand for On Demand softwares with large ERP vendors such as SAP entering the market. However it seems that now the fizz that was once there for this type of software service model is taking a step backwards.

Recent reports stated that SAP is beginning to cut short on its investements on Business ByDesign. Some say this is because they had a tough quarter and felt that they would be in a better position to curb their expenses on R&D in this section than on the SME solutions market, then again isnt SaaS meant for the SME market ??

Even ORACLE have got into the act and state that they are happy to let SAP take the lead role in this area and watch and learn from their mistakes, because ORACLE feels that SAP have a lot to do in just setting up the foundation for this service model style in an ERP Context in the SME Market.

What more, there were even speculations that perhaps ORACLE would take over a few small players in the industry to keep the barrels loaded when they enter the battle field. The way I see things, ORACLE could just be brewing another hot take over around the corner, perhaps even another ERP Vendor that fits the bill with a SOA Architectural style and maybe even moving towards to a SaaSy service model.

Time will tell I guess. Will keep this site updated on the latest happenings.

Feel free to contact me on ssurenlk@msn.com.

Have a nice day !!