Supply Chain: Under One Roof

You can almost picture Ellen Martin, hands under center, calling out the plays, as she quarterbacks her team through the arduous process of getting all of VF Corporation on the same supply chain management footprint, a moving target as VF adds new applications to the suite and new companies to its roster. Martin is vice president of supply chain systems for VF Corp., at $5 billion the world's largest apparel manufacturer, maker of a wide range of well-respected brands. Beginning with the initial rollout of i2 Corp.'s Supply Chain Planner seven years ago, Martin and her team have been working to define and deploy a common supply chain infrastructure across its businesses that VF believes will be intrinsic to its success.

"At the end of this process we will have enabled best practices from a business standpoint that common systems bring to you," says Martin. "Now it's about getting the software in and getting to the end. Then we can start really exploiting the software to give ourselves a competitive advantage."

Custom Coalition
VF customizes its suite for each coalition -- VF's term for the various divisions into which it divides its apparel manufacturing holdings. While anyone can deploy the applications, she asserts, "how you run it and customize it, add best of breed to it," is where the competitive advantage lies. The completed infrastructure "becomes the enabler. We need to be able to make decisions quickly, execute quickly, get in and out quickly," she says.

VF's supply chain footprint will include i2 Corp.'s Supply Chain Planner, SAP ERP that includes the Sales & Distribution Module, Logility and a Retail Floor Space Management System comprised of in-house code and software from JDA Software Group and Spectra Marketing Systems. VF made two additions to its supply chain suite in 2003: NextLink's Trade Collaborator enterprise-level global trade software to manage import and export and New Generation Computing's e-SPS Internet Sourcing and Production system for improved supply chain visibility.

CGT caught up with Ellen Martin to discuss how VF Corp. is leveraging multiple applications under one roof in efforts to achieve and maintain operational success.

What is the current status of NextLink's Trade Collaborator and Next Generation Computing's e-SPS?
We are busily working on those two applications. We bought them knowing there had to be enhancements to both to satisfy our needs. Nextlink has a lot of rules and regulations for Asia but not CBTPA (Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act) and AGOA (African Growth and Opportunity Act). They've written that and we're testing now. The first project will be implemented in Jeanswear at the end of March, and will roll out next to the Outdoor coalition in November in conjunction with some SAP work going on there.

What is the status of your other rollouts?
Logility is in everywhere, and i2 Supply Chain Planner is in almost everywhere. We have i2 Supply Chain Planner in every domestic location except Tampa. That's projected for about April 2004, which will complete the United States, excluding Nautica, which we bought in August. That will be in the new Sportswear coalition. We're attempting to slide them into the schedule.

The SAP Supply Chain piece is in at Jeanswear and Outdoor, hooked to i2 Supply Chain Planner and Logility. We are in the process right now of taking that same supply chain solution and putting it in the Intimates division, scheduled for August 2004.

A second group is deploying the remaining SAP module, Sales and Distribution, in Outdoor by November 2004 and Jeanswear by February 2005. That completes SAP. These are all going on at the same time, which is a real challenge.

You're managing large deployments in a relatively short time. How?
We have a footprint, we know where we want to go, how fast we want to go and how to do the change management and process changes. We're very good at meeting timelines with less people.

It's a tremendous challenge, but we view it as important for the future. We have a SWAT team that goes in and does it in three to six months, depending on the size. We get better at each implementation.

What have you learned from all of those implementations?
In the beginning we generated tons of paperwork that no one ever looked at again. We streamlined to make use of automated tools like e-mail, Lotus Notes databases and project planning tools. We developed a process and a timeline that includes all of the different steps.

We also went in thinking we would use a lot more standard from the software package. We did not realize the amount of customization to be done. We did not do a good job in benchmarking and performance measurement. Now we insist on it.

Another thing we learned early is that we do not map the "as is". Why do we care? My team knows the solution and [the coalition's] team knows the legacy systems, so we talk about it.

The cultural change is one of the hard things. I believe the only way to do that is to have people who are very knowledgeable about the apparel business involved in the systems implementation.

People don't like change. We spend a lot of time developing relationships, showing that we appreciate the difficulty of change. Training is key.

What is VF looking at following the completion of the suite deployment?
I think that there is real opportunity on both the CRM side and the product development side. VF develops alliances with mills that manufacture raw materials, develop thousands of new materials a season and use 30 percent of them in a line. There are thousands of properties to a material, whether it is a fabric, buttons, zippers or closures.

The next season we would like to be able to gather all of that information and then say we are looking for a material with these ten properties and out it pops. This is a problem we'll be working on maybe next year.