Digital Strides: Leveraging SAP with Rizing for a Seamless Fashion Supply Chain

Business expansion is always a good thing. Still, growth comes with its own set of challenges, including keeping up with the technology that drives the business. Organizations today, especially in the retail and fashion industry, often face this challenge in their quest to beat competition worldwide.

For example, a European global fashion company’s global expansion plans required transforming its operations and modernizing its technology.

The Roadblocks to Progress

When the company approached SAP partner Rizing in 2023 to begin its digital transformation journey, it faced a particular set of challenges that limited its growth. They included:

Fragmented systems: The organization’s disjointed IT landscape, due to the use of multiple systems, resulted in manual workarounds. The lack of a unified platform also slowed down cross-functional collaboration between the organization’s teams, encumbering its ability to respond swiftly to market demands.

Disparate processes: The multiple systems resulted in a lack of visibility across functions and manual tasks. This not only impacted productivity and scalability but also led to bottlenecks.

Rizing had three key objectives for the discovery process, given the technological challenges faced by the company:

1. Unify the platform by replacing fragmented legacy systems with a single, integrated ERP solution specialized for the fashion industry.
2. Standardize core processes by capturing them in a central system to improve the organization’s efficiency and scalability while minimizing customization.
3. Increase efficiency and agility by shifting the thought process from just doing to thinking and optimizing across the business, reduce redundant work, streamline workflows, and handle exceptions instead of routine tasks.

Working with SAP S/4HANA Fashion

Rizing approached these objectives by focusing on creating a solid foundation for the company’s digital transformation. First, it defined a clear project scope and a detailed design framework that would keep the project on track. During its discovery assessment, it recommended SAP S/4HANA Fashion.

SAP S/4HANA Fashion meets 50-60% of a fashion customer’s out-of-the-box requirements and supports an accelerated and templated approach. It utilizes SAP fashion industry best practices across wholesale, retail, and manufacturing and includes business processes and solution documentation as well as technical and functional documents.

These features reduce deployment efforts and costs while improving user experience through SAP Fiori apps for better productivity and efficiency.

Through a series of workshops, Rizing outlined key processes and identified critical areas for improvement. It also held detailed design sessions with the company’s team to dive deeper into core topics, refining documentation and creating a clear build plan. A business process master list was developed to guide the implementation of the unified ERP.

The discovery assessment for SAP S/4HANA Fashion helped the team evaluate existing workflows and assess the company’s compatibility with SAP S/4HANA Fashion’s capabilities.

It highlighted the inefficiencies and challenges in the legacy system that slowed the company’s growth and the areas where their systems lacked specific functionalities. Additionally, the assessment revealed enhancements and the seamless transition to more streamlined processes that would be enabled by migration to SAP.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

A unified platform enhances collaboration and efficiency. Rizing’s solutions emphasize the importance of replacing fragmented legacy systems with a single, integrated ERP solution like SAP S/4HANA Fashion. This unified platform eliminates manual workarounds, improves cross-functional collaboration, and enables organizations to respond more swiftly to market demands while reducing inefficiencies.

Standardize core processes for scalability. By capturing and optimizing key business processes, organizations can enhance productivity, reduce bottlenecks, and ensure smoother operations. Additionally, SAP users can benefit from adopting industry-specific best practices and standardized workflows to drive long-term growth.

Leverage SAP S/4HANA Fashion for industry-specific needs. As the success story with the European firm indicates, with 50-60% of out-of-the-box requirements met, solutions like SAP S/4HANA Fashion addresses the supply chain challenges of the fashion industry. It reduces deployment efforts and costs while improving user experience through SAP Fiori apps.