Champion Europe Gets IT Makeover

CLIENT: Champion Europe

CHALLENGE: Consolidate multiple legacy systems onto a modern platform capable of handling logistics operations and retail growth from one location.

SOLUTION: STEALTH 3000, CSC’s enterprise resource planning software application for the fashion industry.

RESULTS: Since implementing STEALTH, retail has become 40 percent of Champion’s business. Notable improvements have occurred in purchasing, logistics and stock management, and product and centralized data management.

A Solution for Fashion

STEALTH 3000 is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software application that we developed to manage the fashion business from source to customer. Today, more than 120 fashion companies license our solution, making it the industry’s standard ERP platform. Because STEALTH is a multicompany, multicurrency, and multilingual product, it is compatible with different contexts, allowing distributed or centralized information system management. The application provides a flexible framework for capturing industry-specific processes through configurable business rules and parameters — which, in the fashion industry, are strongly tied to product value. The solution also offers cross-company features among its specific functions, enabling a corporation to manage different companies on a single database.

by Chris Sapardanis

Styles come and go, but change is always in fashion at the world’s leading apparel companies. For more than 90 years, few brands have met the shifting needs of the market with such adaptability as Champion.

In Europe, the Champion brand has been one of the most recognizable and popular among athletes and fitness enthusiasts for 30 years. But a buyout in 2001 between Champion’s European management and Sara Lee Corp., which owns the trademark outside Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, left the newly independent Champion Europe stifled under several disparate information systems.

“Champion was organized in a complex way with several companies in several European countries,” says Enrico Vernetti, Champion Europe chief finance officer. “Each Champion entity was incorporated in other larger organizations of Sara Lee and each had a different information system. When we completed the acquisition, we were in front of a group that was facing eight different information systems.”

Champion Europe began using STEALTH 3000, CSC’s enterprise resource planning software application for the fashion industry, in 2003. Since the modernization to a unified platform, Champion Europe has been able to manage a distributed company with one business model across its operations.

A foundation to build on

Champion Europe began as a wholesaler, selling to retailers and key accounts, with a small number of retail stores and a limited ability to obtain a high-level view of total operations. Logistically speaking, the company was difficult to run.

From the onset of the new business, management wanted to unify logistics operations and drive a new retail strategy from a centralized location in Italy. Their existing technology couldn’t handle it.

“We were running on IBM A/S 400s and were not seeing this as a technology of the future,” Vernetti says. “We were looking for a solution that was fashion industry-focused, not anything that was rigid. We decided on STEALTH because it was the most modern solution.”

But it wasn’t just about changing the technology behind the company, says Angelo Calabrese, CSC operations director for the fashion market in Italy.

“It’s more about an evolution,” he says, “which is quite common for fashion companies that continue to have a responsive cycle to the market. The market dictates this evolution, its branches, its business, its consolidation efforts, and so on. Our solution is following the evolution of Champion’s business.”

Improving processes for growth

Since implementing STEALTH, retail business has grown to represent 40 percent of Champion’s business in 2010, with 109 stores in 60 countries. The flexibility of our solution enabled Champion leaders to continually meet changing business models.

“We believe that IT systems need to be flexible enough to adapt to changing strategy,” Vernetti says. “Every day the business is changing, so the ability to adapt quickly and change quickly is a key competitive factor. If you are locked into a rigid IT system, it becomes a problem.”

Champion’s success can be attributed to consolidations companywide, in:

Purchasing – Before STEALTH, the purchase order (PO) process was problematic. Each country would take bookings from customers and generate POs. Then, the orders were sent as an Excel file to one of two consolidation hubs where they were manually checked and then loaded and processed. After STEALTH, POs go directly into the system and are immediately visible to a central purchasing department, which places the order with suppliers.

Logistics and stock management – Before STEALTH, the company’s invoices from suppliers were paper-based and loaded manually into an information system. After STEALTH, the procedure is fully integrated. The file is uploaded automatically.

Product management – Before STEALTH, generating a sales booking analysis, by country, market, channel, product, style, etc., was difficult and sometimes unreliable. After STEALTH, the integrated system changed all of that and improved group information.

Centralized data management – Before STEALTH, every country had to load data by product, costs, suppliers, and selling price lists. After STEALTH, it’s all done centrally, giving more financial control. Champion now controls master files for suppliers and pricing information in one location and can readily run analyses by season.

“We supported the transformation of Champion from a number of individual divisions in different countries of Europe into one company centered and managed from Italy,” Calabrese says. “They now run a unified business model across Europe.”

CHRIS SAPARDANIS is editor of CSC World magazine.