The worldwide agreement for more than 1,000 users in over 50 countries extends the companys SAP footprint to its entire network of stores and distribution centers outside of the United States, where the company is already generating a good return on its investment in SAPs retail-industry software. With the global rollout, the leading skin and body care retailer aims to improve its productivity, customer responsiveness and time to market with new products. The Body Shop, an SAP customer since 1999, chose SAPs integrated retail enterprise applications to harmonize business processes across its global network, creating a strong yet adaptive foundation for business growth with the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. The worldwide rollout, being implemented with support from IT service provider Diagonal Consulting, is part of the retailers three-year strategic plan to achieve enterprisewide consistency in forecasting, ordering, allocation and distribution processes. Replacing a number of legacy systems, SAPs 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 companys financial processes, warehouse and supply chain management, new product development and point-of-sale (POS) operations. To improve business support for the various operations using the new retail solution, SAP Education trained managers and staff from The Body Shops 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. The Body Shop chose SAP specialist Diagonal Consulting to lead the implementation and support its global business transformation for the full deployment of SAP solutions. Enterprisewide Insight to Power Business Process Efficiency In creating consistent enterprisewide business processes, one of the companys 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 ERP for planning, monitoring, reporting and analysis. By supporting processes such as warehouse management with insight into product orders and availability, the company will be able to achieve adaptive supply chain operations-for example, adaptive inbound and outbound storage processes to ensure rapid response to spikes in demand while maintaining optimal in-stock levels across the companys global distribution network. With SAP on the Pulse of the Storefront SAP POS Data Management, an SAP for Retail application that helps retailers better understand and fulfill consumer needs, will enable swifter processing and analysis of POS data from The Body Shops 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 companys 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. Faster Time-to-Market for Expanding Product Range< p>
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