January 2009
IBM and Sky IT Group are helping fashion and apparel suppliers, such as New York-based Theory, take advantage of consumer trends more intelligently through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering.
Consumer product companies have conventionally relied on manual and intensive tracking techniques that do not automatically update information or combine data from various sources and this has made it difficult to track sales trends that help make business decisions. Furthermore, they have not proven cost effective either.
Now, utilizing IBM’s DB2 database software and IBM BladeCenter server technology, the Sky IT Group has produced SkyPAD, a SaaS-based dashboard for the consumer products industry to enable manufacturers, distributors and retailers a view of their product sales performance at the store level.
SkyPAD brings a huge amount of data together from the user's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, allowing sales executives and merchandisers to slice and dice information and make informed production, orders and markdown decisions based on real-time product sales performance. And as a SaaS-based offering, SkyPAD eliminates the cost of purchasing and maintaining an in-house solution for its users as well.
After integrating SkyPAD in less than four weeks, apparel company Theory improved business efficiency. Theory fully linked its ERP data with its retailers' data to better identify marketplace trends. For example, if data indicated that sales of a certain color cardigan steadily increased while sales of another color decreased, the company is able to follow the trend and increase shipments of the more popular color cardigan in a timely manner.
"Prior to implementing SkyPAD, we had a static service that would be updated only once per week and it wasn't readily accessible by all who needed the information," said Keitaro Shigemasa, Chief Information Officer for Theory. "We now have a much more flexible platform where information sharing has improved, we are able to easily integrate data from retailers with our internal ERP data, and our overall running costs have significantly decreased."
"It was our goal to help our customers achieve greater visibility of the supply chain and increase their revenues by efficiently managing their inventory," said Jay Hakami, President and CEO of Sky IT Group. "Through our partnership with IBM, we extended our value proposition for our consumer products customers and help them see greater return on their IT investment."
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