Oakland, CA, August 17, 2011 – GT Nexus announced that fashion apparel and accessories company Liz Claiborne Inc. extended its contract for a supply chain visibility and control platform. Delivered as a cloud service, the platform gives Liz Claiborne the capability to tightly monitor and control inventory flows between suppliers, logistics providers, distribution centers and customers.
“GT Nexus has been a key part of our global supply chain management strategy for years,” said Bob Keller, Vice President Supply Chain, Logistics & Administration at Liz Claiborne Inc. “We have automated the highly complex coordination of inventory movement in the cloud where our entire network of supply chain partners all work against a single information set. That is the only way you can run an agile supply chain.”
GT Nexus connects Liz Claiborne to its global partner network and provides visibility across the supply chain, from a broad shipment level view down to specific style and color level detail.
The platform is provided to Liz Claiborne Inc. as a cloud service shared by thousands of other GT Nexus customers and their supply chain partners. By amortizing data management across a vast community of companies, individual participating companies can achieve a level of visibility and information quality that traditional software and value added network (VAN) models have not been able to produce.
“Several years ago, the team at Liz Claiborne had the vision to embrace the cloud technology model for supply chain visibility,” said Greg Johnsen, EVP and co-founder of GT Nexus. “With cloud and visibility now positioned high on every CEO’s priority list, it is safe to say Liz Claiborne’s vision truly paid off. Today, they have a global supply chain visibility control system that most companies dream about.”
Visibility at Liz Claiborne begins when orders are placed with suppliers. From there, the platform tracks inventory flows from booking at origin, international transport, through delivery to the distribution centers. All inventory and supply chain information is linked and stored centrally in the cloud. Partners, internal stakeholders and the Liz Claiborne supply chain team operate off a core set of information.
A “single version of supply chain truth” drives significant process control for the entire Liz Claiborne organization.
“Sometimes we face a situation where we need to orchestrate complex direct-to-store shipments for our key customers,” noted Keller. “To be successful, we need to ensure that 15 different styles of inventory from suppliers in six different countries must hit a four-day ship window at the U.S. port location. It is important to have accurate and timely information about very specific inventory at your fingertips, available in seconds.”
The other cornerstone of the platform is performance analytics. The GT Nexus Supply Chain Intelligence engine sits on top of the visibility data repository and gives the Liz Claiborne team the ability to measure and analyze performance, based on what actually happened. Partner performance, supply chain velocity, data quality and sourcing trends can all be analyzed, across the different Liz Claiborne Inc. brands.
“Access to this information is critical,” said Keller. “When we work with our internal brand groups, it is extremely powerful to have snapshots and analysis of what really happened. GT Nexus has helped us become more proactive with internal performance reporting.”
The supply chain visibility and intelligence platform has been in place at Liz Claiborne Inc. since 2008.
