What is SAP S/4HANA® Fashion?
SAP S/4HANA Fashion provides business innovation for fashion companies – merging wholesale and retail processes into a real-time, in-memory platform to drive retail opportunities in omnichannel, merchandise management, in-store commerce, and inventory visibility.
SAP S/4HANA Fashion:
- Simplifies the underlying architecture
- Modernizes the user interface
- Sets the stage for new functionality and processes
- Becomes the launching point for new business opportunities
Let’s take a closer look at how the solution helps fashion brands transition to the digital age.
1. Segmentation, Demand Forecasting, and Supply Assignment
Fashion companies use planned demand data to support requirements planning methods and optimize stock levels across the supply chain.
With S/4HANA Fashion, fashion brands can intelligently match demand and supply, with inventory segmentation capabilities and greater visibility into inventory across locations and channels.
- Use rules to segment stock with predefined logical characteristics such as retail or wholesale sales channels or physical characteristics such as quality grade or country of origin
- Use distribution curves in sales, purchasing, and demand management scenarios to distribute quantities automatically across different variants of a generic article if the quantity is provided at the level of the generic article
- Create and organize planned independent requirements for multiple articles at the same time
- Optimize stock use through automated supply assignment rules
- Manage orders more efficiently and allocate constrained supply and inventory to multiple channels according to defined business rules
- Guarantee an automated release process with the release status that only fixed, allocated items are ready for delivery
2. Store Merchandise, POS, and Transferring Inventory
Store associates and managers can access product and inventory data from anywhere in stores and at any time. This helps improve productivity, store performance, and increase store sales, shopper loyalty, and customer and employee satisfaction.
- Check product availability in nearby stores
- Access real-time product (style, color, or size variants of products) promotions, stock information, and bonus buys
- Adjust the stock of products for different reasons such as shrinkage or spoilage
- Transfer stock from one store to another or from a store to a distribution center. All documents relevant for a transfer are created and filled automatically within the SAP Fiori app
- View stock inventory counts and perform daily tasks like making adjustments to stock inventory levels
- Resolve issues related to product quality and prevent lost sales
- Transfer article-related information to POS and store merchandise management solutions, including article descriptions, units of measure, and sales prices
- Use the information in assortment lists, for example, to support the planning of in-store visual inspections
3. Omnichannel Inventory and Immediate Inventory Look-up
Fashion brands need to track of inventory levels across locations and channels. With S/4HANA Fashion, you can get real-time information of your products, including how much stock is available in your store, distribution center, or other store locations.
- Review stock for generic articles with variants and inventory values at retail price
- Plan, control, and manage the flow of merchandise from suppliers to distribution centers and then to stores or customers
- Carry out cross-docking in the distribution center through support of push and pull processes to move the merchandise through the warehouse faster, reducing the costs for processing and storage
- Automatically convert goods to be transferred from a site’s consignment stock to a site’s own stock
- Automatically valuate all goods movements at retail based on the material ledger and post physical inventory differences at retail
- View stocks currently available and ensure efficient processing of inventory adjustments
- Create and maintain sales orders for single articles, generic articles with variants, structured articles with sub-items, and full products with empties
4. Pack Separately – Ship Together (PSST)
Pack Separately – Ship Together (PSST) allows fashion companies to identify the order items to be shipped together based on customer business rules. The grouping rules are used to assemble sales order items (within a single or across several documents) into PSST groups and these can be processed together in Supply Assignment (ARun) and Outbound Deliveries.
5. Replenishment Planning, Allocation and Collaboration
Deliver optimum amounts of merchandise to a large number of stores on a regular basis with S/4HANA Fashion. Automated processes help optimize and integrate merchandise flow across the supply chain, including processes that involve third parties.
- Leverage master data and movement data required to run replenishment processes
- Use order proposals for creating purchase orders for external or internal suppliers
- Carry out cross-docking in the distribution center through support of push and pull processes to move the merchandise through the warehouse more quickly, reducing the costs for processing and storage
- Create a merchandise allocation to control which stores get which merchandise in which amount and when (push process)
- Make stock figures and sales data available to suppliers and manufacturers to support material requirements planning and replenishment planning
6. Retail Price Planning and Omnichannel Promotion Pricing
With S/4HANA Fashion, sales prices are planned based on factors such as purchasing prices and margin goals. The system takes into consideration what consumers are willing to pay for products in stores or through non-store channels.
- Define retail sales prices for articles at the level of sales channels or sites with a validity period based on strategies like planned markups on procurement prices
- Recalculate and maintain retail sales prices based on changes in influencing factors, such as purchase price adjustments, or the need to comply with a new business strategy
- Omnichannel Promotion Pricing (available with a separate license) ensures correct and consistent sales prices in all sales channels with the added flexibility of applying simple discounts and mix-and-match promotions to shopping carts
7. Source and Buy Merchandise
Through effective buying processes, fashion companies can now get goods faster and at lower cost from suppliers globally. They can adapt buying processes to specific merchandise and increase procurement process efficiency through order consolidation.
- Create purchase orders for single articles, generic articles with variants, structured articles with sub-items, and full products with empties
- Automate purchase order scheduling at a granular level along the inbound supply chain by defining important intermediate steps such as ex-factory dates and the arrival of merchandise at shipping destinations
- Collect and consolidate multiple store orders into a single purchase order for external suppliers to eliminate inefficient manual procurement activities associated with large numbers of individual orders and speed up supply chain processes from supplier to warehouse to retail location
New Business Potential: SAP S/4HANA as a Digital Core
Beyond the underlying changes in technologies powering this new wave of ERP are new capabilities that deliver a transformational change to each department.
With all the available and planned SAP innovations now focused on SAP S/4HANA, and given the product support and maintenance plans, the need to adopt SAP S/4HANA Fashion is a given.
The longer an organization waits, the more they miss out on capabilities exclusive to SAP S/4HANA Fashion, and the harder it will be to catch up.
Rizing’s experience with S/4HANA Fashion:
- Collaboration on the S/4HANA Fashion product’s development including continuous feedback based on validation testing
- Advising key customers on a solution road-map and strategic direction
- Co-innovating SAP Fashion Management (the solution which led to the development of SAP S/4HANA Fashion)
- Implementing multiple global installations of Fashion with omnichannel functionality across wholesale, retail and e-commerce
If you are looking to get started with digital transformation or adding S/.4HANA Fashion to your technology stack, schedule a Rizing assessment with our experts.
The Assessment Includes:
- An S/4HANA Fashion demo
- A comprehensive analysis of where the S/4HANA Fashion platform can improve your current processes.
- Identification of your most appropriate path to S/4HANA
- Establishing the key project considerations and tools needed to support the transition to S/4HANA