Global Sportswear Brand Accelerates Business Transformation with SAP S/4HANA^®

The Challenge

Drawing strength from a long heritage, the client is one of the largest sportswear brands in the world. With their vision set on increasing speed-to-market with the latest trends, they realized they needed a change in core business processes to support their long-term growth objectives.

An aging IT backend system limited their ability to accomplish their vision. The goal was to replace the company’s heterogeneous IT landscape with a more standardized and modern architecture that helps them achieve their overarching goal of infusing speed and transparency to their retail and wholesale processes, and make data-driven decisions to resolve issues affecting supply chain partners across the globe. Key challenges included:

• Integration: Multiple legacy systems across geographies and business channels not allowing the company to drive their omnichannel strategy
• Lack of scalability: Multitude of customized and disparate systems that could not sustain the company’s growth across multiple regions
• Time consumption: Basic functions taking significant resources, time, and increasing the total cost of ownership

The company chose SAP S/4HANA for Fashion and Vertical Business as the digital platform to transform business, support long-term growth and to enable continuous innovation. Rizing was chosen as the SI partner for the project.

Strategy and Solution

Rizing worked with the client to design, build, and implement SAP S/4HANA for Fashion and Vertical Business across global retail, wholesale and ecommerce operations. Initially rolled out in Europe, it’s currently underway in other regions with minimal disruption to the company’s day-to-day business. Key pillars of the project:

Scalability

Successful design, build and roll-out for retail and wholesale in EU before proceeding with further regions. Successfully built global template of standardized process to be rolled out to any country with minimum adjustments

Standardization

Leading practices-driven development of global template using Rizing’s Future Reference Solution (FRS) approach and the preconfigured Fashion Suite™.

Harmonization

Provision of a consistent retail operating model by eliminating the mismatch between business operating model and financial/tax model, and transactional complexity.

All-Inclusive Implementation

Roll-out of SAP S/4HANA for Fashion across retail and wholesale operations with e-commerce integration (CAR, POS DTA).

The Outcome

Rizing helped this European sportswear company by implementing SAP S/4HANA for Fashion and Vertical Business and thereby enabling them to drive a digital transformation of their processes. The company is already benefiting from a high degree of transparency, which helps eliminate errors, cut costs and reveal unprecedented insights into merchandise, customer preferences and profitability.

Global and Scalable Template

Successfully established a template for global roll-out of retail and wholesale

Real-time Information

Data is captured, managed, and analyzed at unprecedented speeds to rapidly respond to changing demands

IT Simplification

Simpler landscape and simplified business processes helps manage and execute all core processes in a common IT footprint – lowering TCO

Single Solution

Single vertically integrated platform across wholesale and retail enables omnichannel business processes and services

Global Processes

Standardized and integrated processes, where all transactions are captured in one SAP system – enabling efficiencies on a global scale

Complete Transparency

All transactions including adjustments are visible and auditable, with automated finance processes