Success Stories

CASE STUDIES > Consumer Products AFS Solutions

Introduction
The apparel and footwear business is highly challenging. Trends are created overnight. There is relentless pressure on price, cost, and lead times. The business has to contend with constant changes in the global environment.

Today, apparel and footwear companies are increasingly assuming the role of coordinator for both internal and intercompany processes as their core competencies shift away from production, and steadily move toward planning, controlling, and monitoring textiles in the value chain. Areas such as product development, raw material and finished goods requirements planning, production planning, coordination and control, transport optimization and monitoring, and quality assurances are taking on more importance, and thus tend to remain at headquarters. As a result, the information flow and collaboration among partners in the textile supply chain (logistics service providers, textile manufacturers, contractors, agents, and so on) are becoming more critical to the success of apparel and footwear companies.

AFS – Industry Solution
SAP Apparel and Footwear Solutions (AFS) is focused on the apparel and footwear industry. In the standard categorization of SAP AFS industry specific solutions, AFS is categorized under 'Consumable Products'. SAP AFS is built on the SAP Core with valuable extra functionalities to support the specific needs of the apparel and footwear industry. Among these are the ability to handle sizes (grids), categorize products based on their common features like countries importing the goods, quality grades of the product, etc.

SAP AFS Key Features

AFS Grid functionality:
Handling materials in sizes is a special requirement in the apparel and footwear industry. This is achieved with AFS Grid functionality. AFS grids are three dimensional in nature. In other words, there can be three variables maintained in the grid value.

Categories - are used extensively in AFS to categorize products which posses the same characteristics. For example, the same product can be graded as Quality-A and Quality-B after quality checks. These products will have different market values and customer demand patterns. This can be easily replicated in SAP AFS using categories. The requirement and the supply will be handled based on the category allocation.

Seasonality - is probably the most important aspect of the apparel and footwear trade. The same product can change its characteristics based on the season. For example, the color or some label details might change with the season. This is where AFS seasonality comes into play. Seasonality is especially prominent in the SD (Sales and Distribution) module.

SAP AFS - Key Business Process
Sales and Distribution Scenarios

  • Sales Order Processing
  • Finished Goods Cross Company
  • Pre-Order
  • Rush Order
  • Purchase to Order
  • Third Party Order

Material Management Scenarios

  • Finished Goods and Raw Materials Sourcing
  • Subcontracting
  • Warehouse Management
  • Stock Management

Production Planning Scenarios

  • Make to Stock
  • Make to Order
  • Cross Plant / Cross Company Code Manufacturing
  • External Processing in Production
  • Combined Orders

Client
The client is one of the world's largest manufacturers and distributors of luggage casual bags, business cases and travel-related products. SAP America served as the implementation partner to help the company realize its global strategic objectives, and execute its mission of providing innovative solutions for the traveling world.

The main focus was on the implementation of SAP for the company’s Canada and US locations. This helped in integrating and globalizing their retail and wholesale businesses, reducing IT costs and deployment risks, and enhancing their ability to compete in the global marketplace. SAP’s industry-leading Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods Manufacturing and Financial solutions enhanced the critical business processes, including global sourcing, distribution, transportation/logistics, product innovation, inventory visibility, financial transparency and compliance.

Using SAP was a Key Advantage
Different applications like JD Edwards and Island Pacific were used for different processes of the business. To integrate all these information and data from different locations, SAP has been implemented. SAP Apparel and Footwear Solution (AFS) seamlessly integrated the business requirement of manufacture of molded luggage and baggage, which varied with different dimensions and characteristics. SAP Version ECC 5.0 with AFS module was used in the implementation of the project.

Supply Chain and FICO modules were also implemented. All the business processes provided by these SAP modules were also implemented successfully.

Benefits Achieved

  • Integrated different sites, thus maintaining a centralized database
  • Integrated various business processes with AFS Module, avoiding various applications
  • Online transactions with banks by means of SAP FI-Bank Accounting
  • Effective asset management with the help of SAP FI-Asset Accounting
  • Automated sales process right from the receipt of sales order.

A total of 10,000 man hours were spent on the project with a workforce of 13 resources.

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