A complete re-platforming of an ERP solution is essential to face current digital challenges. It serves an opportunity to use new technologies for future growth.

However, if the right approach isn’t taken, it can be a daunting task for any company, often involving significant risks and unmanageable costs. To an extent, a proof of concept (POC) helps resolve some of the uncertainties, but it’s non-reusable and the effort taken does little to mitigate potential risks.

Migrating to SAP S/4HANA® for Fashion: A Major Shift for Fashion Businesses

For apparel, footwear and fashion companies looking to implement SAP S/4HANA for Fashion and Vertical Business, the move creates a long list of questions that need consideration before any kind of work can begin.

Some of the biggest customer concerns about making the move to S/4HANA are:

  • Potential disruption
  • Organizational readiness
  • Impact to current operations
  • Difficulty in identifying the extent of potential change caused by a radical reconstruction of the entire SAP environment

In order to avoid system downtime and business interruption, it’s essential to validate new processes and applications work as required by the business. Testing and validation must be done early and often to ensure high coverage of day-to-day business activities and system processes.

As a close collaborator of SAP S/4HANA for Fashion and system integrator currently involved in multiple S/4HANA implementations at global fashion companies, we’ve been able to identify practices proven to work across the industry.

As a result, we’ve combined our leading practice methods into a pragmatic approach to implementing S/4HANA, using our working knowledge of S/4HANA, its tools and accelerators along with our unique fashion industry acumen.

Introducing Future Reference Solution (FRS) for SAP S/4HANA for Fashion Implementations

To minimize risk, Rizing’s Future Reference Solution (FRS) is designed to provide fashion brands with a reusable, personalized template of SAP S/4HANA for Fashion that uses our rapid deployment solution – attune Fashion Suite™.

Incorporating Rizing’s knowledge of SAP S/4HANA for Fashion and proven practices, this fit-for-purpose solution is a preconfigured S/4HANA for Fashion environment that helps reach the desired outcome in a more efficient and effective manner.

  • It’s a reference system for S/4HANA Fashion that helps define a global high-level design template with reference process documents.
  • It a more complete and higher-quality template than a generic S/4HANA Fashion industry template.
  • FRS is built on attune Fashion Suite™, a preconfigured S/4HANA for Fashion solution, incorporating fashion-specific business processes that including seasonality, segmentation, order allocation and fashion product management.
  • It guides implementation by combining SAP and industry leading practices with a fashion brand’s unique requirements.
  • It contains all of a brand’s major in-scope processes – addressing known and common challenges need to be re-engineered and resolved by using standard SAP functionality.
  • It improves the quality of the following phases while minimizing modifications due to preliminary work.

Key Benefits of a Future Reference Solution

1. Shape ERP Scope

  • Helps determine the future state of your SAP S/4HANA for Fashion solution
  • Validates potential clusters for convergence or divergence for developing reference process documents used in the blueprint phase.
  • Brand-specific data can be added to the Future Reference Solution, along with a brand’s major in-scope processes to enhance validation in the subsequent phases.

2. Minimize Risks

  • Helps rapidly validates and adopt processes by documenting ‘TO BE’ business processes prior to the blueprint phase with reduced risk, cost, and time.
  • Adds lead time to address items that can impact scope/timeline, minimizing business interruption and accelerating resumption of daily operations.
  • Increases early adoption, and encourages a group of super-users who will become trainers after go-live, eliminating the need for a separate phase of User Adoption Training.
  • By engaging key users early and often, the solution can more practically vetted. This enables better decision-making, and allows better assessment of change impact to the business.

3. Enable Blueprint Planning

  • All FRS material can be used to plan, prepare and conduct the blueprint. This improves delivery quality, expediting the timeline and minimizing efforts during the entire course of the program.
  • Drives the global high-level design/validation with a higher-quality template, complete with prebuilt configurations, test cases, and gap analysis.
  • Significant time savings by building documentation on top of existing Rizing Fashion content and writing functional and technical specifications only once.