The fashion industry has always managed to be one of the most fast changing industries of all time. However, with the seeds of globalization, it has not only witnessed an alltime surging traffic but an increased buyer expectations. Today along with novel product categories combined with vertical integration it has made sure to boost its natural dynamism exponentially. Meeting the ever changing needs of the industry thereby the customers comes the innovative solutions of SAP FMS.
However, in this context, you can appreciate SAP FMS fully only after understanding the existent flaws of SAP AFS.
What SAP AFS has to offer and why it lacks sustainability?
SAP Apparel and Footwear (SAP AFS) was formulated majorly with the goal to streamline company logistics managerial processes. This problem specific-solution of SAP made it readily a big hit in the wholesale industry. However, with the wholesale distributors slowly expanding their reach towards retail outlets, the hands of SAP AFS fell short. It could not render a support for both retail and wholesale market needs thereby creating the need of SAP FMS systems. That meant running two independent ERP systems catering to two different kinds of needs and goals. Enter the SAP FMS!
Harmonizing the challenges of running two independent ERP systems for two different needs, SAP FMS is the finest answer to the problem. It fused the functionalities of wholesale and retail market all under one. What followed was streamlined system with better integration where wholesale dealers could enhance their brand awareness and visibility at the same time.
Here is a quick glance at the capabilities of both the AFS and FMS systems.
SAP AFS: major functionalities
- Ease of handling sizes
- Ease of categorizing products based on their common features like country of import, quality etc.
- Ease of handling seasonality.
- Ease of access where it leverages AFS users to use it irrespective of its location and platform.
The major features of SAP FMS
Bringing together the power of wholesale, retail and fashion specific processes all under one roof, FMS is a power-packed tool. Some of the many problems it addresses are as follows:
- Master data: gives and unified view of articles, customers, vendors, seasons, collections and sites.
- Merchandizing: Caters to centralized management of listings, pricing, promotions and inventory.
- Sales: Integrates direct-channel orders, deliveries and point-of-sale systems.
- Multichannel Planning: Enhances seasonal forecasting, together with offering multi-channel allocation and store replenishment.
- Manufacturing: It helps to manage manufacturing planning, production and supply chain.
- Flexible data processing: It empowers companies to handle end-to-end flow of material across all relevant procurement applications with precision.
- Segmentation: It allows ease of categorizing materials on the indices of physical and logical characteristics.
Why to migrate from SAP AFS to FMS?
Maintaining cadence with the changing needs of the customers and the business landscape is always the biggest critical point for any industry to make itself sustainable.
SAP FMS exactly does satisfies this need. Offering the flexibility with the benefits of a stable solution, SAP FMS makes sure that businesses stay ahead of their competition.
The ideal road map to SAP’s Fashion Management Solution (FMS)
Although you may be aware of the potentials of the solutions by now, what needs special attention here is the exact route map which will lead to the highest efficacy of the systems.
Talking of that, the best way to FMS goes through a Greenfield implementation that finally migrates data from AFS to FMS along with the data of other retail systems.
The many advantages of SAP FMS
So now when you know what both the systems has to offer you, let’s see FMS’s advantages at a glance.
1. Platform integration for lower TCO
2. Unified Global inventory transparency
3. Cross channel integration
4. Omni-channel visibility
5. Real-time analytics
6. Stock protection
7. Enhanced consumer insights with HANA
8. Social media and sentimental analysis
9. Consistent consumer experiences
10. Personalised offers and loyalty program
11. Store and e-commerce connectivity
12. Persistent support for SAP
Implementing SAP FMS:
SAP’s FMS is a HANA embedded system that can be implanted as an add-on to existing SAP ERP for SAP retail.
Why HANA at all?
The indispensability of HANA in the solution is majorly dominated by 2 reasons:
- Huge amount of data needed to be delivered under unified platform.
- The additional developments of the new solution oriented applications were never possible before the flexible platform of HANA.
However, in order to get the most of this powerful tool there are some IT pre-requisites that needs to be checked.
1) Installation of SAP enhancement package 1 for SAP ERP 6.0
2) Support package 04 on HANA database
3) After successful installation of the add-on activate business function FASHION_01. However to achieve so you need to activate the following business functions.
3.1 other enhancements for SAP retail (ISR_RETAILSYSTEM)
3.2 retail (EA-RET)
3.3 material segmentation across logistics (LOG_SEGMENTATION)
4) Tools for custom object analysis
5) Templates for master data, test scenarios and configuration.
However, there are some key factors that companies may like to consider to determine their respective adoption paths.
- Investment on FMS thereby differentiating marketplace
- Running a test over a new season over a particular region
- Start with retail only operations thereby exploiting other features
Integrating SAP FMS
The whole of the FMS solution of SAP is based on 3 major components, the materials management, sales and distribution and logistics. FMS works to blend the three to bring out the most of each of them.
AP Fashion Management Solutionis a fully integrated system that brings the processes for vertical fashion companies all under one system. It not only enables them to manage their business processes across one large data-system landscape but also enables industries to exploit the power of in memory computing to analyze large data volumes for fast and accurate product overviews. What follows is improved efficiency, faster time to market and augmented inventory control.
Apprisia makes sure that your installation and interaction with SAP FMS becomes the most effective with end-to-end customized assistance.
Experience the growth ride with the right tools and expert assistance today!
Author
Team Apprisia
