Global clothing manufacturer adds innovation to every stride with SAP

Blazing a trail to increase transaction speeds with SAP

The client has become a world leader in Western-wear and boot manufacturing. As their share in the work-boot and Western-wear market grew, so did the volume of transactions their systems had to handle.

Their products are designed and developed in the US and manufactured around the world. While the brand is consistent across locations, there was some variation in the business software running in different countries. When these different environments were reaching end-of-life, they saw an ideal opportunity to consolidate and modernize their IT environment and unlock more SAP capabilities.

The solution would have to be able to adapt to rapid increases in sales due to general expansion as well as red-letter shopping days like Black Friday. It also had to support their goal to expand from e-commerce to retail. The solution had to meet the regulatory requirements of all the areas where they do business as well as keep pace with their innovations and changing business requirements. The solution had to integrate with other systems to manage everything from manufacturing to wholesale and retail.

Seamless transition to an interconnected environment

Their innovations have disrupted the boot and Western wear industry. However, disrupting their manufacturing, e-commerce and retail environment wasn’t an option when transforming the environment to the latest version of SAP, S4/HANA. We therefore meticulously planned our approach to their enterprise resource planning (ERP) environment.

The first step was to transfer applications from other ERP solutions to SAP S/4 HANA for fashion. This offered a single platform to manage manufacturing and retail activities and enabled us to interconnect systems, such as using Cognos for reporting. Salesforce supports the entire front end of their business and our private cloud supports the entire back end.

The solution also involved migrating databases with different landscapes to a HANA database to process transactions faster. Combining our private cloud environment with a cloud-based ERP makes it easier to manage the environment and takes advantage of cloud-native applications.

Flexibility supports operational excellence

Transforming the ERP landscape to SAP S/4 HANA has created a flexible system that can adapt to changes in demand and handle transactions, enabling them to focus on building their business. Integrating functions from outside the SAP environment and improving the user interface has simplified the way reports are generated.

Racing to improve the speed of transactions

Since the new IT landscape has a single HANA database, its transactions can be processed faster. The user interface has also improved.

Simplifying reporting

The integrated system brings together information from different tools to create a single report, ensuring accurate data and analytics for faster decision making.

Improving resilience and uptime

The integration of Salesforce to support the front end and our private cloud to manage the entire back end ensures a seamless, resilient infrastructure.