Shortcomings of SAP Retail for Apparel and Footwear Companies - The forgotten KISS Principle

In my previous post, I wrote about my past experience working for several Apparel and Footwear vertical companies that implemented SAP AFS for their manufacturing part of the business but refused to implement SAP Retail for their Retail part of the business. Now I plan to start giving some facts that support my belief that this has become the rule rather than exception.

The first important thing to mention is that when SAP is trying to sell a solution for a vertical Apparel and Footwear company, basically they offer following baseline solution:

That alone should explain by itself the whole point. The first thing that comes to my mind when I look at that solution is "Messy". SAP is telling us that we need to buy, license, configure, test and maintain two different flavors of R/3 in order to be able to fulfill the requirements of vertical Apparel and Footwear companies. Additionally, we will need to build and maintain following interfaces according to SAP:

1. Article Master Data (From Retail to AFS system).
2. AFS Material Master Basic Data (From AFS to Retail system).
3. Prices.
4. Initiation of the Listing Procedure Workflow, upon creation of a new Article or Variant.
5. Sending of a Purchase Order from SAP Retail to an AFS Sales Order via EDI.
6. Sending of a Shipping Notification from AFS to SAP Retail via EDI.
7. Sending of an Invoice from AFS to SAP Retail via EDI and executing Invoice Verification in Retail.

Well, that's miles away from the well known KISS principle (Keep it simple, stupid!). Common sense tells that when something is complex (like implementing an ERP system), you should not make it twice complex (like implementing 2 ERP systems) if there's not a huge trade-off!. And there isn't.

So why does SAP offer such a complex and complicated solution? I will elaborate in my next post.

Shortcomings of SAP Retail for Apparel and Footwear Companies - Introduction

Well, it's been quite a while since my last post. I have to start by saying that I decided to put off my certifications efforts in SAP Retail due to lack of time, but mainly due to the new insights I gained as SAP AFS (Apparel and Footwear Solution) Consultant in my last projects. During the last few years I worked in several full life cycle SAP AFS implementations projects which gave me a new understanding about how SAP really fulfill the requirements of Apparel and Footwear companies. This in turn discouraged my to pursue a SAP Retail certification.

Follows some facts:

- So far I have worked in 3 SAP AFS implementation projects.
- Average implementation time for each: 2 years.
- All vertical companies: produce the own brand and sell it through own stores to end customer.
- In only one of these companies was SAP Retail + SAP AFS implemented. In the other two only SAP AFS was implemented.
- This only company is now removing SAP Retail after 5 years of operation and implementing store stock management in SAP AFS and building interface to third party POS system.
- The other two companies kept the legacy retail/POS software and integrated it with SAP AFS via interfaces.

So what's the reason for these companies deciding not to implement SAP Retail together with SAP AFS or even removing SAP Retail after a few years of usage? I will try to elaborate on this in my following posts. Stay tuned!.