Robust Platform
for Growth
Facilitates increased innovation and growth by delivering a future-ready platform able to support innovation and meet rapidly evolving market conditions
Case Study
Hela Apparel Holdings Fuels Digital Transformation with SAP S/4HANA® Fashion Manufacturing
Hela Apparel Holdings PLC is a social capital-focused company built on the principles of inclusivity, equality, and climate stability. With over three decades of industry experience, Hela builds strategic partnerships with global brands to provide apparel supply chain solutions with distinctive advantages.
The organization has a global presence with 11 manufacturing facilities in Sri Lanka, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Egypt, and design centers in Sri Lanka, the US, the UK, and France. Hela employs over 20,000 people.
Key Challenges:
- Drive expansion goals: The company was growing rapidly and expanding to new markets and geographies. Hela required a robust ERP solution to sustain and shape that growth.
- Ability to innovate faster: The company needed to strengthen its capabilities and apparel manufacturing business processes to innovate faster and better service its global clients.
- Lack of Integration: Legacy systems were limiting the integration needed to increase productivity, boost efficiency, and eliminate waste.
- Limited standardized practices: The company was solving the same problem in different ways at different locations.
Hela’s Business Case for SAP S/4HANA Fashion Manufacturing
Future-Proof Platform
SAP S/4HANA provides Hela with a scalable, end-to-end platform supporting connectivity across the value chain.
Global Best Practices
SAP S/4HANA provides a single source of truth to help Hela effectively manage global operations.
Unified Real-time Actionable Data
The robust digital core of SAP S/4HANA enables real-time data visibility for Hela and lets them extract the information they need to run their global operations efficiently.
Integration to Third-party Applications
SAP S/4HANA enables integration with other applications to streamline Hela’s operations. This helps the company work closely with customers and suppliers and promote data visibility to different internal divisions.
Project Highlights
- attune Fashion Suite™: The company used the attune Fashion Suite – a preconfigured solution on S/4HANA Fashion – to build a reference solution and create their SAP S/4HANA blueprint.
- Scope: Hela incorporated leading practices in order-to-cash, procurement, production, and finance business processes.
- Project Approach: The project covers 11 factories in Sri Lanka, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Egypt. Following the development of the Future Reference Solution, the project progressed smoothly to the build phase. The first go-live phase was successfully completed within 16 months.
- Go–Live: The go-live included the Kids cluster in three plants in Sri Lanka and one plant in Egypt.
- Next phase: Hela plans to rollout to the Intimates and Kinetix cluster including five plants in Sri Lanka, two in Ethiopia, and one in Kenya.
Customer’s perspective
A Robust Foundation for Continuous Growth
“Our IT platform is key to driving our strategy by supporting innovation, digitalization, and scalability. Digitizing end-to-end processes with a digital core empowered by SAP S/4HANA has given us the transparency and flexibility we need to support our global growth while future-proofing the business.
We believe that as we continue our digital transformation, the move to SAP S/4HANA with integrations to third-party applications including a Hela-designed and developed Manufacturing Execution System will facilitate greater innovation and accelerate our growth.”
Ruwanthi Fernando,
Chief Information & Process Officer,
Hela Apparel Holdings PLC
SAP S/4HANA Fashion Solution Highlights
Rizing developed a custom program to control order profitability by capturing the full order costing prior to MRP.
Hela achieved greater inventory visibility by capturing Roll and Bin-related Material data. They also created a PO Cockpit at the PO level to help navigate excess or leftover stock for allocation prior to raising POs.
Sales orders are connected to a third-party production planning system which provides greater visibility and decision-making.
Rizing enabled a factory-floor automation using a manufacturing execution system connected to SAP in near real-time, with QR codes generated in SAP.
Rizing’s Master Data Accelerator (MDA) enabled master data uploads for faster and more accurate data entry.
Integrating various applications into SAP S/4HANA creates a single source of truth, enabling real-time reports and quicker response times.
A typical day’s work using SAP S/4HANA Fashion Manufacturing:
- The solution covers the entire order to cash process from generating sales orders to finished goods including the outbound commercial process
- The Procure to Pay process includes merchandising bulk procurement, raw material goods receipts with quality inspection, and supplier payments
- The Plan to Produce includes cut and sew and is tightly interconnected with the Hela Manufacturing Execution System and third-party production planning system to deliver daily operating metrics
- The Record to Report process overlooks the financial and controlling aspects of accounting and management accounting, backed by integrations with multiple banks for payments
SAP S/4HANA Fashion Manufacturing Benefits
Robust Platform
Standardized
Business Processes
Standardizes and integrates business processes to improve operational efficiency across all geographies and manufacturing facilities
End-to-End
Transparency
Resolves data redundancies by simplifying a complex landscape, eliminating manual tasks, and providing real-time visibility into global operations
Digitized Supply
Chain Operations
Streamlines supply chain management with a unified view of inventory for greater control and visibility
A Single Source
of Truth
Delivers a unified system creating a single source of truth to support proactive decision-making, increasing productivity and compliance across the organization
Cloud-Based
Enterprise Solution
Enables a cloud-first strategy to support enterprise workloads on the cloud for greater accessibility and storage management
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