On the 14
th and 15
th March innovation leaders from over 20 high-profile fashion brands came together for the SAP Fashion Council Meeting in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Kindly hosted this year by PVH at their new European headquarters, the Fashion Council Meeting brought together SAP customers from across the globe and included brands such as:
361 Sport, ASICS, Benetton, Burberry, Calzedonia, Coach, Columbia Sportswear, Ecco, Gerry Weber, G-Star, Hilfiger, Kering, Kering Eyewear, Levis, Loro Piana, Luxottica, Missguided, Nike, PVH Europe, PVH NA, Ralph Lauren, Rockport, 361 Sports as well as the Fashion Leadership team of SAP SE.
Some background on the council: Fashion Council is a strategic forum held twice a year for Fashion innovators to share experience and best practices, education on SAPs Fashion roadmap and not least to build a network of Fashion innovators. One of the resulting initiatives was the Co-Innovation program that Adidas Group, Giorgio Armani, Luxottica and PVH Europe joined with SAP to co-develop the SAP Fashion Management.
SAP Fashion Management is a multichannel, vertically integrated fashion application that harmonizes wholesale, retail and manufacturing processes within one back-office software system. SAP released SAP Fashion Management in January 2014 and the solution now has 65+ customers.
Peter Akbar, Chief Customer Officer Fashion at SAP, facilitated the meeting and introduced the theme:
"In Digital Fashion 52 is the new 4"
hinting at the growing expectations and need for speed to deliver compelling compelling assortments all year round,
Thus, the two days at the Spring 2017 edition of the Fashion Council were full of content around innovation for the Fashion business.
Fashion leaders from SAP laid out detailed product roadmaps specific to Fashion to help align their initiatives with the latest solution and platform technology delivered by SAP. The SAP product owners shared the on-going council feedback on influence and priority areas to set the direction for further enhancements of the solution portfolio.
There were updates from Dr Thomas Vetter, Head of Development Consumer Industries and Dr. Christoph Schroeder, Chief Solution Owner Fashion. Thomas talked about the architecture and digital core foundation for fashion, the SAP Customer Activity Repository and new retail innovations including the digital store platform and machine learning platform. Christoph shared an update on the S/4HANA Retail, capabilities and planned S/4HANA Retail innovations. Ravindra Prabhala, Head of Fashion Product & Development, presented the deep dive into the planned and upcoming enhancements on the Fashion Management roadmap.
PVH Europe, Benetton Group, Giorgio Armani and Rockport presented deep dives on their strategy as well as their progress and challenges in keeping up with today’s generation of shoppers and consumer.
Some common themes emerged:
- Manage the ever-growing complexity of assortments and networks and resulting data complexity while speeding up order and delivery cycles
- Handle different sourcing, manufacturing and distribution strategies and optimizing the flow of goods to the customer
- Integrate disparate channels and store formats to enable source from anywhere and fulfill anywhere
- Engage consumers through a vast number Digital touch points to extend brand reach, drive new demand and gain a superior understanding of tomorrow’s trends and styles
The common ground between all the customer’s perspectives was simple, but compelling:
- establish a digital backbone and run their business end to end on a real-time platform
- propel the digital engagement with customers and prospects to drive interest, revenue and growth.
And finally the The Fashion council members got treated to a tour of the customer showrooms on the 10th floor of the PVH Europe headqarter as well as the Tommy Hilfiger digital showroom
In summary the tone and common spirit were very optimistic: the future of Fashion holds significant opportunity for those who innovate and stay close to their customers.
If you are interested in the Fashion and the upcoming activity please get in touch with Peter Akbar, Chief Customer Officer Fashion
peter.akbar@sap,com or Dr. Christoph Schroeder, Chief Solution Owner Fashion,
christoph.schroeder@sap.com.
To find out more about SAPs Fashion solutions and the SAP Fashion Collection please visit the
Fashion Collection on sap.com