Carhartt Implements SAP S/4HANA® Fashion to Support Customer Demand
Carhartt is a 130+ year old brand known for its rugged, long-lasting workwear apparel and footwear.
Famed for its quality, durability, and innovation, people ranging from construction workers to farmers to a-list stars rely on Carhartt.
Growing due to increasing popularity, US-based Carhartt decided to transform their technology and the processes it enabled.
After researching options, Carhartt took a major transformation step by replacing its heavily-customized ERP with a stable, scalable SAP S/4HANA platform.
Carhartt wanted to provide a frictionless shopping experience for customers, ensuring there was no downtime or negative impacts on business. However, the technology upgrade occurred during the pandemic, causing the company to rapidly shift to a remote project implementation.
Overcoming Challenges With a Modern Digital Core
The company chose SAP S/4HANA for Fashion and Vertical Business to underpin its transformation from multichannel to omnichannel and address business challenges:
- Integration: The company was evolving its traditional wholesale business model by integrating online sales and retail stores to increase its direct sales and this required an integrated IT core across the company. They were operating multiple legacy systems which hampered their omnichannel strategy.
- Lack of scalability: A multitude of customized and disparate systems couldn’t sustain the company’s growth.
- Inventory management: The company faced difficulties managing pools of cross-channel inventory due to lack of visibility.
- Process improvement: In addition to the technology, the company realized they needed to change the technology-enabled processes. By using SAP to eliminate those pain points, the company provides a better experience for their associates, suppliers, and customers.
Carhartt’s Business Case for SAP S/4HANA
Rapid Growth
Rapid growth and marketplace disruption meant Carhartt needed a flexible backend with omnichannel capabilities. With S/4HANA, the company now has a single, vertically-integrated platform for wholesale and retail, enabling omnichannel processes and services.
Power Innovation With a Stable Core
Carhartt’s legacy system was fast approaching its end-of-life. S/4HANA provided a future-proof architecture that could accommodate the company’s existing plans and their long-term business goals. They are now able to roll out innovations without impacting the core ERP.
Digital Capabilities
To face the current market realities, the company needed a platform that provided robust digital capabilities. SAP S/4HANA provided a digital core with the ability to extend and expand as business requirements evolve.
Complete Integration
The company wanted to unify information across operations. S/4HANA provided complete integration with merged data from all departments, functions, and operations.
Customer Point of View
Industry Know-how and Technical Expertise
“From early on, we appreciated Rizing’s ability to create meaningful relationships with the Carhartt project team. Rizing’s technical infrastructure and architecture experience was apparent as they consistently partnered with our infrastructure team to ensure there were no blockers that impacted the business’s momentum.
They took pride in their work and went above and beyond to help us stay on track. We are immensely proud of our collective ability to deliver this project on time, especially given the fact we were entirely remote for the last 4-5 months, which is quite frankly, incredible.”
Jenny Hall
Director of Project Catalyst, Carhartt
The Value of an S/4HANA Digital Core
Single Platform: Merge retail, manufacturing and wholesale data in a single system with tight integration to related systems, such as CRM, PLM, etc
Data Aggregation: Enterprise-wide access to a single source of truth for decision-making in real-time
Extend and Innovate: Flexible, scalable, and agile system supporting current and future needs. Enables starting businesses in shortest possible time
Inventory Management: A fully-connected system providing real-time visibility into inventory to minimize excessive inventory, costs, and write-offs and enable fulfillment options
Merchandising: Provides key processes around merchandising, which can be managed together with wholesale and manufacturing processes for a complete view of products, labels, inventory, and stores
Manufacturing: Manage fashion-specific manufacturing functionality including production control workbench, master orders, marker, feasibility analysis, and collective orders
Omnicommerce Customer Experience: Provides functionality to support in-store, online, mobile commerce, customer order management, omnichannel customer insights, and personalization.
The Outcome
Carhartt used Rizing’s preconfigured solution for SAP S/4HANA Fashion – Fashion Suite™ – to accelerate the implementation and migration of their retail business to the new platform. Integration testing and project cutover was all virtual. The next phase of the project includes implementing solutions to support their wholesale and direct-to-consumer eCommerce business.
Carhartt believes further investment in digital technologies is a winning strategy that will also provide a fantastic experience for customers.
Digitized Retail Operations
We successfully established retail operations on S/4HANA for improved merchandise management and digitized store operations with mobile-enabled apps, eliminating manual tasks with automated processes.
Improved Processes
The solution captures, manages, and analyzes data at unprecedented speeds, backed by standardized and integrated processes all captured in one SAP system.
This improves both the speed and quality of business process execution, decreasing overall operational costs.
The solution manages processes with a global ownership view that helps Carhartt increase performance, lower costs, and gain more meaningful business insight.
Simplified IT
The final solution provides a simpler IT landscape and business processes. It helps manage and execute all core processes in a common IT footprint – lowering TCO.
Consolidated Solution for Wholesale and Retail
We implemented a single vertically-integrated platform across Carhartt’s wholesale and retail channels, enabling omni-channel business processes and services.
Real-time Inventory Management
We created a single view of inventory to optimize stock sourcing and allocation which reduces stock-outs, lost sales, and excess inventories.