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

Wipro’s Fashion Rental Solution is one such endeavour that addresses growing consumer need for choosing products that are greener, while at the same time creates new revenue streams and embraces a sustainable, circular-economy model for the business.

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.

Business Trends and Needs

The Problem

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

Wipro’s Fashion Rental Solution addresses the “re-usability” aspect of this problem.

The Solution 

Most 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:

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 re-use 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 while embracing, and championing, circular-economy principles.

Key Technical features

A winner at the SAP Innovation Awards, this solution leverages intelligent technologies such as SAP Build Process Automation, AI , and 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 rental item. Scanning a generated QR code alerts the store staff of the appropriate issue or 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. Here the retailor has been digitally assisted with annotation on all visual differences, improving the claims settlement and hence the customer satisfaction.
2. Utilizes SAP Build Process Automation for the entire back-end business. All the back-end transactions have been automated with RPA for completion of activities, such as issue of products or generating a bill, with an event trigger which significantly improves rental operations. The entire set of activities happens in seconds leading to quick turnaround for customers and a better in-store experience.
3. A Carbon Calculator that calculates the CO­₂ emissions saved by the customer renting the item instead of buying it. Gives the customer immense satisfaction to see their bit done for our planet. Coupling it with store credit continuous the virtuous cycle and builds consumer loyalty. For example, customers accumulate ‘Green Points’ that can be redeemed for discounts on future rentals.

Conclusion

As recent years have shown, sustainable and resilient businesses have the ability to innovate, translate challenges into opportunities, and transform ideas into products, solutions, and services that meet their customer needs. To achieve these goals, adopting new-age digital technologies such as automation, AI, and ML in the cloud is a necessity rather than a choice. Services like process automation help customers improve and control their business process easily and provide the ability to bring people and process together even if it’s outside the realm of the SAP ERP system. SAP BTP has a comprehensive portfolio of services which help address all these needs.

We blend the numerous offerings from SAP BTP, such as process insights from Signavio and low-code products SAP Build Process Automation and SAP Build Apps from the SAP Build portfolio, 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 to participate in the innovation journey.

Wipro has invested in these technologies and by leveraging SAP BTP, we have been able to help our customers transform their innovative ideas into customer facing products and solutions. Our award-winning Fashion Rental Solution is the perfect demonstration.