Dubai, United Arab Emirates - January 15, 2014 - SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced 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.
Fashion companies strive to be customer-centric by using best practices 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 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 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 global business suite platform 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, CIO, Tommy Hilfiger. "We look forward to using these best practices to run faster than ever before."
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.
Reethu Thachil
Wallis Marketing Consultants
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Telephone: 971 4 390 1950
Fax: 971 4 367 2800
Mobile: 971 50 440 2735
Email: reethu.thachil@wallis-mc.com
www.wallis-mc.com
About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device - SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 251,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.
Media contacts
Husain Al Tamimi, SAP +971 56 6811641, husain.tamimi@sap.com
Claire McPeak, SAP, +971 4 330 1777, c.mcpeak@sap.com
Neil Jaques, Wallis Marketing Consultants, +971 4390 1950, sap@wallis-mc.com
© Press Release 2014
