SAP partners with Adidas, Tommy Hilfiger for swifter sales

SAP today announced plans to collaborate with key customers to better meet the challenges faced by apparel, footwear and accessory companies.

Working with adidas, Luxottica and Tommy Hilfiger, SAP envisions bringing a new fashion solution to the marketplace that will better enable fashion brands to manufacture their products and sell them to retailers and consumers using one single, vertical solution.

Wholesalers and manufacturers that run retail stores and have direct-to-consumer Web channels may keep inventories in disintegrated silos, leading to issues in stock and distribution decisions, SAP says.

This can also mean new styles are not brought to market quickly enough, and moving into new markets and channels is cumbersome and time-consuming. The planned single solution is envisioned to give fashion companies a unified view of inventory.

The collaboration aims to enable retailers to meet these challenges and manage the vertical, omni-channel business processes across one system landscape.

“With this development, we plan to help our fashion customers become truly vertical,” said Lori Mitchell-Keller, Global Head, Industry Business Unit Retail, SAP. “As a result of this planned collaboration, we aim to bring the processes for vertical fashion wholesale, manufacturing and retail into one system using the power of our proven global business suite platform on SAP HANA.”

“Our innovation with SAP is intended to create a new single platform for speed and growth across our multiple businesses and distribution channels,” said Ludo Onnink, CIO, Tommy Hilfiger. “We look forward to using these best practices to run faster than ever before.”