Today customers manage their vertical fashion companies as two different business processes — design, develop, buy, and sell to wholesale customers and to customers through their own retail channels — using two different SAP systems. Both systems use different data models and concepts and are integrated through data interfaces.

SAP Fashion Management is an integrated solution to bring these two processes for vertical fashion companies into one system. This solution enables them to manage their business processes across one large data system landscape. It also enables the companies in the fashion industry to use the power of in-memory computing to analyze large data volumes for a fast and accurate overview of products. This results in greater efficiency, quicker time to market, and better inventory control.

SAP Fashion Management aims at harmonizing the following processes:

◈ Master data concepts for articles

◈ Planning and Procurement

◈ Inventory Management

◈ ATP or Re-Scheduling and Allocation Run

◈ Flexible data processing:

The solution supports companies to handle an accurate end-to-end flow of material across all relevant procurement applications. It also enables data processing based on the characteristic values such as style, color, size, and season, and other flexible segmentation characteristics such as seasons and sales channels.

◈ Segmentation:

The solution allows you to categorize materials or articles based on their physical and logical characteristics. For example, color and size are physical characteristics of a fashion article and quality and country of origin are logical characteristics of a fashion article. The requirement segment is important in sales, for example, in sales orders and planned independent requirements. Stock segments are used for the logical distribution of the existing physical stock and the future receipts or procurement proposals such as purchase requisitions. For more information about segmentation, see .

◈ Multichannel planning:

You can forecast future demand and procure supplies for multiple sales channels. You can also manage the demand of different channels separately, for example, retail, wholesale, e-commerce, or franchise according to the channel-specific processes. MRP on HANA now supports materials (articles in Retail) with segmentation. For materials with segmentation, the system executes the MRP processes based on the rules defined in the segmentation strategy. The MRP run is performed at the variant level of the generic article. As a result, separate documents (purchase requisitions) are created for each of the variants belonging to the same generic article to fulfill the open requirements at variant level. This means that the planner or user must spend a lot of time checking a lot of documents for variants belonging to the same generic article. You can enable the grouping of purchase requisition functionality, and during the MRP run the system then groups the variants belonging to same generic article into a single document based on certain criteria. For more information about MRP, see Materials Requirement Planning.

◈ Manufacturing:

Production in Fashion Management relies on the SAP ERP standard production scenario and production-related master data and documents. Bill of Materials (BOM), Task Lists, and production version user interfaces, and program interfaces are enhanced. For more information, see Production Planning and Control.

◈ ATP with segmentation:

With advanced methods of requirement segmentation and the availability check, you can ensure that high priority channels receive their planned quantities even if their demand is delayed.

◈ Season management:

You can define the production of fashion wear according to the season for which it is manufactured such as summer or winter. In the fashion industry, a season belongs to a season year and has collections associated with it. The collections in turn have themes associated with them. You can define a validity period for every season. The seasons assigned to the articles are used or determined in both the sales and the purchasing documents. These seasons can then be transferred to the follow-on documents such as the outbound or inbound delivery and billing document. For more information about season management, see Season.

◈ Characteristic value conversion:

You can represent the value of a few characteristics of a fashion article on different scales for different countries or regions. Apart from defining base characteristic values, this feature allows you to define characteristic values in different country scales. You can maintain characteristic conversion type controls which can be country or region-specific identifiers. You can define the characteristic conversion IDs for an article, customer or vendor, and a user parameter. For more information about characteristic value conversion, see Characteristic Value Conversion.

◈ Value-added services (VAS):

Customers can request for special labels, packing according to certain criteria, or other special services for their goods. Depending on the service requested, additional articles or additional personnel/labor or special skills may be required. These services increase the value of the finished goods to be delivered. You can handle these services including the costs using the value added services in the fashion industry. You can assign the information related to different services using conditions. Later, the services are determined in the application documents (sales order, stock transport order, purchase order). During special business processes in sales, such as Third Party Order (TPO) and Purchase-to-Order (PTO), the VAS information is copied to the purchasing documents from the sales documents and you cannot change the values in the purchasing documents. For more information about value-added services, see Value-Added Services.

◈ Order allocation run:

The unique situation in the fashion industry necessitates an optimized assignment of existing stock to open requirements (sales orders and stock transport orders). For example, the allocation run ensures an assignment of the available stock to the open requirements according to your business requirements when there is a shortage of stock. The allocation run creates a fixed assignment between the requirement records, physical stock (batch managed or non-batch managed) and future receipts. You can only undo this assignment manually. The allocation run is a process based on rules. You can use the settings to sort the stock or requirements, release the allocation to decide when each individual requirement should be processed and the priority. For more information about order allocation run