SAP AFS Being in FASHION

It is well known that SAP had an integrated single solution to offer to all industries prior to the SAPPHIRE in 1994/95; it was during this event that SAP realized the importance of catering to each industry individually as all of them had their own unique way of doing business.

This brought into existence solutions that cater to 21 Industries, and one of its latest additions being the SAP Apparel & Footwear Sector Industry Solution. This solution caters not only to the Apparel and footwear but also to home furnishing, product allocation and contract manufacturing. 

Given the nature of this industry where trends are created overnight SAP had to design the right solution that would take into account at most the various process complexities that are associated with this industry whilst still maintaining integration across all functional areas of the solutions.

Let’s look at a few things that SAP AFS IS has to offer:

SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT

As most often that not, SCM is at the spotlight again, proving its prominence in the manufacturing environment. With the SAP AFS solution you can maintain and keep track of the entire supply chain from procurement of raw materials to delivery of the final product.

A counter argument to this would be that, this is somewhat of a general comment and all other ERPs also would give you this trackability, however in SAP AFS with the use of specific Material Management Features such as “Source Allocation”, “Quota Check” and” Factory Status” helps with the operations involved in the procurement of raw materials.

Other features such as “Route Determination” and “Subcontracting” contribute with keeping track of operations related to deliveries and subcontracting respectively. Another feature designed specially in the SAP AFS Solution is the ability to use season logic in order processing with the use of basic data such as season indicator, season table etc.

CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT

This term is more affiliated with the service industry environment and given that customers in this industry are among the most demanding, its only natural that there is a lot of attention given to activities contributing to generating customer satisfaction.

SAP AFS provides special features when it comes to back order processing and automatic order scheduling. The other flexible options such as AFS Standard Sale price, factor price and 2 date pricing cater to the complexities of pricing methods followed in the AFS Environment.

MASS DATA PROCESSING

Given the nature of the AFS industry and all the operations that goes into converting a plain roll of fabric into a sexy lingerie that would be worn by the next super model, it is only obvious that the amount of data to be maintained in the system would be overwhelming.

SAP AFS takes this aspect into account by providing a flexible master data structure and helps to simplify the time-consuming mass data change that would take place in this industry.

There are lot more features such as the ability of E-Business models and Enterprise Portal to help with specific operations in the AFS Industry and the importance of Corporate Performance Management Information and how the AFS Solutions caters to this need.