IOTEK designed and developed a unique collaboration solution along with SAP Custom Development team for our client. It enabled seamless collaboration between their trading partners and helped them cater to changing customer demands.

Customer Profile

Our client is a Fortune 100 company that designs, develops, markets, and sells athletic footwear, sportswear, gear, equipment, and accessory products for men, women and children. The company has about 930 retail stores worldwide operating in over 160 countries. It distributes goods to independent distributors, subsidiaries and licensees, and has nearly 22,000 retail outlets across the world.

Business Challenge

With expanding global supply chains, increasing procurement-supply chain divide, and inaccessible organizational silos, transparency into procurement processes is greatly obscured for retailers. That said, businesses are continuously striving for innovation in supply chain operations and transformation within procurement systems. Our client needed a solution that would create the right strategic sourcing environment to enhance networking, achieve considerable cost reduction, and improve returns.

Business Objectives

• Improve purchase collaboration between stakeholders and suppliers and automate purchasing procedures in source-to-pay processes
• Facilitate plain-sailing and speedy purchase order activities
• Deepen customer relationships by catering to their dynamic demands
• Seamless sharing of purchase requisition between factories for faster product dispatch
• Enable real-time inventory tracking and send updates to ensure customer satisfaction

How We Helped

We helped our client deploy a supply network collaboration system to enhance communication between buyers and sellers in procure-to-pay and order-to-cash life cycles. To fine-tune business with customer demands, we also worked together with our client to customize or enhance a standard SAP module, which, in turn, raked in greater returns for them. Our support service and frequent upgrades to the software have helped in providing business continuity to the client.

We used an eclectic mix of SAP products like SAP NetWeaver, SAP AFS, SAP XI/PI, and so on to cater to the clients’ varied sourcing needs. The solution involved a massive custom solution development, investing long 20,000 hours of development. This was also one of the first and largest custom solutions built over SAP NetWeaver Technology. Being a predecessor of SAP Supply Network Collaboration Solution (SNC), it can help in serving customer demands efficiently and an order of magnitude faster.

What They Achieved

The central collaboration platform has enabled improved communication and collaboration between the internal stakeholders and streamlined procurement system. It has provided transparency and agility into buying and selling processes, more than ever before. The powerful tracking and management tool has helped minimize IT burden drastically as well as facilitate easier budget checking and contract compliance with vendors, buyers, and regulations. The client could also witness a considerable boost in return on investment.