Retail in Asia

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Zalora embarks on company-wide project to deliver operational speed to employees

Zalora operations SAP IBM news - Retail in Asia

SAP announced that Zalora has selected SAP S/4HANA to enhance its operational capabilities and streamline processes for real-time business decisions.

Founded in 2012, Zalora is Asia’s online fashion destination, serving markets across Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan. With more than 30,000 products online from over 500 international and local labels, Zalora provides fashionistas access to the latest fashion goods from across the world. To meet the growing needs of its expanding online business, Zalora looked to SAP for a reliable, scalable and industry-grade enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Before adopting SAP S/4HANA, Zalora’s accounting processes required manual input for details such as revenue and product costs, which were computed outside of its accounting system. This posed a challenge for the business due to the reliance on human input rather than processes for data integrity and reporting. Without an integrated solution, business information was often presented in silos with no flow between other key systems, presenting a lack of real-time data that were crucial to operations and planning.

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“To support our continued growth as a leading online fashion retailer, we needed a platform capable of automating and streamlining existing processes and the capacity for large scale expansion,” said Parker Gundersen, Zalora Group CEO. “SAP’s S/4HANA solution fulfilled our objectives of visibility, compliance, automation, productivity and sustainability. We’re very excited that SAP’s real-time insights allows us to better meet the needs of our digital business.”

SAP S/4HANA® is a business suite that helps organizations to run their core business processes digitally and live. Characterized by simplifications and high effectiveness, SAP S/4HANA is a system of intelligence which automates processes and provides end users with active decision support in real-time based on data from both internal and external sources. With SAP S/4HANA, Zalora will be equipped to handle extremely high volume orders per day during peak sales periods and promotions and gain real-time customer and business insights.

At the core, Zalora also foresees that it will become more productive from enhanced real-time oversight of critical financial data that will grant insight and address issues in merchandising, sales, supply chain, finance and control, and compliance, through a single platform.

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Zalora will also be leveraging the expertise of IBM for the implementation across its business. IBM will support Zalora by working closely with its project teams to migrate Zalora systems to the SAP S/4HANA platform.

“Online businesses are increasingly driven to innovate and discover new ways to deliver values to their customers along the entire purchase journey,” said Khor Chern Chuen, Managing Director of SAP Singapore. “Zalora has transformed the way people shop and interact with their favourite brands, and this project highlights how the company is blazing the trail in digital transformation. We are excited to work with Zalora, one of the fastest growing online fashion retailer in Asia, to accelerate their business and provide a better experience for their customers and increase business value as an e-retailer.”