adidas Sports SAP Technology To Offer Seamless Shopping Experience

Since 1924, when Adi Dassler started the company, the adidas Group has been on a mission to provide athletes with the best sports equipment possible. Today, adidas produces a multitude of brands in footwear, apparel, and hard sporting goods such as the TaylorMade line of golf equipment. All these products are designed to help customers stay on top of their game and looking great.

adidas strives to bring the best products to market each and every season. But staying ahead of consumer demand requires a deep understanding of the customer and the ability to respond to changing market conditions.

The Challenge

These days, consumers expect brands and retailers to offer a seamless shopping experience in-store and online, including via mobile devices. Reacting to this shift in consumer expectations, the company wanted to move from a single channel focus to a more integrated omni-channel approach.

At the same time, they saw significant benefit in unifying their manufacturing, wholesale, and retail business units with even simpler, more standardised IT systems.

The solution

As a long-time SAP customer, adidas saw the opportunity to drive further growth in the e-commerce market by building on their existing software landscape. To achieve their goals, adidas Group is implementing the new SAP Fashion Management application running on the SAP HANA platform.

adidas is looking to SAP Fashion Management to help bring together manufacturing, wholesale, and retail business operations onto a single platform.

With their new systems in place, adidas will be better able to achieve global consistency while offering product availability and service across multiple channels and consumer touch points.

Kai Bienmüller, head of IT wholesale ERP, adidas Group, said: “With SAP Fashion Management and SAP HANA, we will be able to greatly improve our customers’ experience. Not only will these solutions help us become a truly omni-channel organisation, they give us the insight to better anticipate customer demand both today and in the future.”

Benefits

The sporting goods giant expects to achieve complete visibility from the factory floor to the retail shops and across the e-commerce channels. This visibility – along with data analysis from sources such as point-of-sales data – will provide a better understanding of customers. This insight can help replenish shelves with the best-selling products and increase cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

With improved forecasting, adidas will able to better anticipate what consumers will want tomorrow, in a week, or even a month down the road. adidas also expects to see a reduction in system complexity, leading to both time and cost savings. Moving forward, adidas is focused on accelerating the delivery of customised merchandise.

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