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.