Skin and body care retailer to integrate enterprise management, point of sale operations SAP for Retail Industry solution
London — July 9, 2004 — Leading skin and body care retailer The Body Shop is unifying its worldwide operations on SAP enterprise software, deploying the SAP for Retail industry solution across its headquarters, regional offices, warehouses and more than 2,000 wholly-owned and franchise outlets worldwide.
The worldwide agreement for more than 1,000 users in over 50 countries extends the company's SAP footprint to its entire network of stores and distribution centers outside of the United States, where the company is already generating a return on its investment in SAP's retail-industry software. With the global rollout, The Body Shop said it aims to improve its productivity, customer responsiveness and time to market with new products.
The Body Shop, an SAP customer since 1999, chose SAP's integrated retail enterprise applications to harmonize business processes across its global network, creating an adaptive foundation for business growth with the SAP NetWeaver technology platform.
The worldwide rollout, being implemented with support from information technology (IT) service provider Diagonal Consulting, is part of the retailer's three-year strategic plan to achieve enterprisewide consistency in forecasting, ordering, allocation and distribution processes.
Replacing a number of legacy systems, SAP's suite of core enterprise applications and specialized software for retailers will cover end-to-end business processes from headquarters down to the store level, powering the company's financial processes, warehouse and supply chain management, new product development and point-of-sale (POS) operations.
"As we continue to expand our business internationally, we need a single, enterprisewide IT platform to effectively manage the increasing scale and complexity of our global operations," said Jon Granville, global head of IT, The Body Shop. "Our global SAP rollout is not an IT initiative, but a business initiative that will help us improve our key processes that drive competitive advantage at each local outlet. Building on the benefits gained in the U.S., SAP for Retail will help us provide targeted support throughout our sales and distribution network and, ultimately, deliver better service to our customers."
To improve business support for the various operations using the new retail solution, SAP Education trained managers and staff from The Body Shop's project team in areas such as pricing and promotion, procurement and purchasing, and warehouse logistics.
With the support of SAP Germany, the rollout kicks off this summer with the POS solution for worldwide retail outlets, where The Body Shop expects to achieve quick results in improving data management.
In creating consistent enterprisewide business processes, one of The Body Shop's key aims is to gain better visibility into the vast amounts of information on suppliers, customers and products throughout its global business.
At the heart of the integrated solution will be SAP Business Intelligence, a component of SAP NetWeaver, which will enable The Body Shop to gain timely, accurate insight into information across its widespread retail network. All stock movements and cash flow will thus be tracked at a detailed level, and financial implications of business processes will be posted to mySAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) for planning, monitoring, reporting and analysis.
SAP said that its POS Data Management will also enable swifter processing and analysis of POS data from The Body Shop's retail outlets around the world. The POS application will feed information such as events and promotions, prices and margins, and analytical reason codes for returns to a system at each of the company's regional offices and then centrally to the global headquarters. By providing users at all levels of the global organization with easy access to timely, reliable information on these key business drivers, the application will enable strategic and responsive decision-making to optimize promotional and sales activities for individual geographies or specific product categories.
To help reduce the cost and increase the speed of new product development and introduction processes, The Body Shop will deploy mySAP Product Lifecycle Management. Drawing on integrated business intelligence capabilities to align product design to market analysis and customer demand, the solution will enable the company to manage each new product's life cycle from inception and production, through supplier collaboration, to the product launch and trade promotions management.
