Wipro’s Sustainable Fashion Rental Solution

⇨ Innovation can play a pivotal role in sustainable business growth

⇨ This plug-and-play cloud solution extends ERP capabilities

⇨ AP Process Automation, AI, and ML provide real-time visibility

We’ve always believed that innovation is a leading driver of business growth, and technology powers Innovation. Most of the new innovations, comes with plethora of complex requirements, like Realtime prediction, Seamless integration of structured and unstructured data and need to support social, ecological and government regulations.  These are solutions that bring in process differentiation, bring in New Business models, new services or new revenue streams and providing business-critical capability not present in standard or integrating disparate systems. These solutions are characterised by  usage of Intelligent technologies.

Wipro’s Fashion Rental solution is one such endeavour that one addresses growing Consumers need for choosing products that are greener and sustainable and at the same time create new revenue streams and embrace a sustainable & circular-economy business model

Business Driver:

Today, the new generation of customers are not just fashion conscious but demand eco-friendly products.  Thus, fashion & retail companies are innovating new product lines and business models centred around circular fashion.

The problem

As per earth.org, each year 92 Million tonnes of clothing ends up in landfills, $500 Billion is lost each year due to under-utilization and inability to recycle clothing. This is only growing. There is an express need for businesses to evolve innovative ways to reduce waste, re-use and re-cycle more.

Wipro’s fashion rental solution addresses the “re-usability” aspect of this problem.

The solutions:

Most of the large fashion and apparel companies use SAP solutions to run their business operations. Wipro offers a plug and play cloud solution that extends the core ERP capabilities and helps companies orchestrate an innovative “Fashion Rental” business process.

The solution offers all the capabilities needed to deliver a rental business process. The key capabilities are:

Capabilities for the store

1. Rental Product Cataloguing
2. Online Rental store
3. Realtime visibility to reservations, in-progress rentals and over-due rentals
4. Photo and Video graphic recording of the pre and post rental status of the garment
5. Realtime ML Assisted identification of anomalies pre and post rental
6. Automatic damage fee assessment in-case of damages during return

Capabilities for the customer

1. Online e-commerce like portal for searching rental garments
2. Reservation
3. Easy store pickup
4. Easy store returns
5. Online bill generation and payment assistance

Built on SAP Business Technology Platform, Wipro’s Fashion Rental Solution enables a rental model through which fashion manufacturers can rent their designer products online. This strategy promotes reuse and recycle behaviours while providing end consumers real-time visibility, pricing, quality certificates, and insurance protection in a subscription-based contract model.

Using Wipro’s Fashion Rental Solution, retail and fashion organizations can deliver an improved experience for customers, capitalize on new revenue models, and contribute to a reduced carbon footprint and the embrace of circular-economy principles.

Key Technical features

A Winner at the SAP Innovation Awards,  this solution leverages intelligent technologies such as SAP Process Automation and AI & ML and can be easily integrated to e-commerce platforms and SAP applications such as SAP S/4HANA and SAP Commerce Cloud.

One of the core solution tenets was to have a seamless digital handover or return of the fashion accessory or dress. Scanning a generated QR code via a scanner alerts the store staff for the appropriate issue or a return cycle.

1. Use Machine Learning to derive intelligent digital-decision support – Quality issues during product returns are the most conflicting part of the transaction and here Retailor has been digitally assisted with annotation on all visual differences improving the claims settlement and hence the customer satisfaction.
2. Utilizes SAP Process Automation for the entire back-end business– All the back-end transactions have been automated with RPA for completion of activities like Issue of products, generating bill, etc with an event trigger which help improves rental operations significantly. The entire set of activities happens in seconds leading to quick turnaround for customers and a better in-store experience as well.
3. A Carbon Calculator that calculated the CO2 emissions that would be saved when the rental cycle was done (instead of the customer buying it ). Gives the customer immense satisfaction to see their bit done for our planet. Coupling it with store credit points ( A ‘Green Point’ idea, you accumulate X points and get a Y% discount on rental …)

Conclusion

As the recent years have shown sustainable and resilient businesses have the ability to innovate and translate challenges into opportunities and transform ideas into products, solutions and services that meet their customer needs. To achieve these goals, adopting the new age technologies such as Cloud, AI & ML, Automation and going Digital is today a necessity rather than a choice. SAP BTP platform has a comprehensive portfolio of services which fits into all these needs. Wipro has invested in these technologies and platforms and leveraging SAP’s Business Technology Platform, we have been able to help our customers transform their innovative ideas into customer facing products and solutions. Our award winning “Fashion Rental” is a demonstration of this.

We blend the numerous offerings from SAP BTP such as process insights from Signavio, various Low-Code No-Code products from the SAP Build portfolio such as SAP Build Process automation, AppGyver with deep design and development expertise to offer rapid time to value. We also encourage and help customers pioneer the usage of the various Low-Code No-Code  offerings to democratize software development and allow citizen developers as well participate in the innovation journey. Services like Process Automation help customers improve and control their business process easily and also gives the ability to bring people and process together even if it’s played outside the realm of the SAP ERP system.