SAP AFS Retail - Blog Presentation

Hello World!,

In their 2007 AMR Research article: "A Five-Year Vision in Apparel and Footwear: Balancing Cost, Risk, and Opportunity", Janet Suleski and Stephen Hochman wrote:"The (apparel and footwear) industry has a woeful legacy of under-investment in the necessary process, abilities, and supporting technology to manage through the inherent complexity. But an increasing number of footwear and apparel executives recognize that the industry is at a tipping point”.

Later they added:

"Increasingly, brands are opening their own retail channels; retailers are expanding private label activities into full-fledged wholesale operations; and manufacturers are moving forward into one or both of those activities. We’ve had many conversations in the past year with companies that would like to cover their wholesale, retail, and manufacturing operations with a single system, or at least with multiple applications from a single vendor— but the software vendors still need to catch up to market requirements".

"Today, no single vendor offers a truly completely unified ERP backbone that covers wholesale, retail, and manufacturing operations. One-third of all apparel and footwear companies, and nearly two-thirds of companies with annual revenue greater than $100M, are instead pursuing best-of-breed strategies while keeping a close eye on the future possibility of moving to a single vendor system. Those interested in the unified theory of ERP should keep an eye on Infor, Jesta I.S., Lawson/Intentia, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP in particular".

This blog’s goal will be to present my findings about how well SAP industry solutions AFS and Retail together fulfill the requirements of apparel and footwear companies expressed in the authors’s article.

I decided to focus my analysis on SAP offerings and not on other software vendors since that’s my area of expertise and interest: I’m a SD certified consultant with several years of experience in SAP AFS (SAP solution for the apparel and footwear industry) and with some experience in SAP Retail.

Stay tuned to learn about my findings!.