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The need for a modern ERP for Apparel, Fashion & Footwear industry

The apparel, fashion and footwear industry deals with an uneven landscape across their manufacturing, distribution, e-commerce and in-store channels. With an ERP system (Enterprise Resource Planning), apparel manufacturers can modernize their operations for better work productivity and efficiency.

As your company grows, you will soon start to find yourself implementing more solutions to keep up with the product demand and company scalability. At some point, your company will start to slow down as there is more software in place without any integrations. These types of solutions are termed “hairball solutions” which end up using extra company resources without any actual returns. Companies with such type of a solution architecture often deal with duplicate data entry, increased manual work, lack of system integrations that affect business functions in the long run.

In order to avoid such costly scenarios, we urge all growing businesses to opt for a solution like NetSuite, which keeps growing along with your company even 10 plus years from now.

An ERP business solution like NetSuite can easily handle all business operations from a single management solution which eliminates the need for running multiple management solutions. NetSuite ERP can easily handle many aspects of the apparel and fashion industry like demand planning, apparel/footwear design, merchandising, eCommerce, shipping, production, revenue recognition, billing, finances, accounting and more.

In a nutshell, NetSuite ERP can optimize the business performance/revenue with a reduction of manual errors and a better time to value.

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What is the innate need for getting an ERP for the Apparel industry?

Accounting, procurement, demand planning, inventory management, shipping, customer relationship management, labour management are some crucial parts of the fashion industry. As mentioned before, some companies might be handling these functions on different systems but that affects the performance of the company. By utilizing an ERP system like NetSuite, the Apparel industry can automize these functions and cut back on time and increase their productivity by ten folds!

Benefits and key features of an ERP system for the Apparel companies

The main focus of an ERP implementation is to ease and streamline a business. Once a business is running on a modern ERP system, they will soon find themselves to be more efficient in their line of business. Without further ado, here are some of the most major benefits of an ERP system for the Apparel industry.

Better inventory control and management

An ERP system helps in better inventory management by sorting inventory into different segments. Companies can set up their inventory based on colour, design, shape, size and some other attributes among more. Companies can also set up matrix items for easy inventory control, whereas companies can also manage their vendor-managed inventory completely via NetSuite. Such optimal inventory management helps businesses to meet the demand while ensuring inventory that comes first gets sold first (FIFO).

Production & Supply Planning for the high demand Fashion industry in NetSuite

Apparel and footwear brands are often under immense customer service and cost pressures to produce and procure the right products (garment, dye etc.) at the right time. By offering live-time visibility into your inventory status and sales metrics, NetSuite gives fashion producers and the textile industry, the most accurate and up-to-date information for proper manufacturing and purchasing plans. This, combined with NetSuite’s ability to manage complex supply chains—including co-packers and 3RD party logistics — makes NetSuite a comprehensive production and supply chain management tool for the modern Apparel, Fashion & Footwear businesses.

NetSuite also helps fashion brands and the textile industry by providing a real-time view and real-time data into the manufacturing business processes of the fashion industry like dyeing, labelling, printing, colouring, sewing and more. Custom quality control checks can also be set up to ensure the right product reaches the right customer.

Handle customer payments, invoices and receipts in NetSuite

NetSuite business intelligence tool has a full-fledged Accounting management solution that can handle Accounts Payables (AP), Accounts Receivables (AR), invoices, billing and more. With NetSuite, you can conveniently handle multiple customers with diverse orders at the same time as it can automate the billing process. NetSuite can also notify you about pending balances, receipts and invoices etc. to ensure your general ledger (GL) stays updated every time.

On the other hand, NetSuite can also handle taxation and compliance of different countries with NetSuite OneWorld.

Accurate Demand Planning in NetSuite for the textile industry

Demand planning is a very important aspect when it comes to the time-sensitive fashion industry. Companies need to make sure that their Demand Planning data is accurate, or they run into the risk of high monetary losses due to short demand & wasted inventory. Proper demand planning is necessary to meet customer demand/expectations and to improve operational efficiency. NetSuite’s modern demand planning features factors in a wide variety of information in the demand planning process —including historical sales, new opportunities and quotes, sales orders, seasonality and trends etc. — to provide the most robust and pinpoint picture of demand.

Centralized alerting, reporting & monitoring within NetSuite

NetSuite consists of robust reporting and alerting functionality that leverages an intuitive modern user experience (UX) to empower users to perform complex data analytics in a matter of seconds! Users can easily and securely explore their data, create sophisticated criteria filters with real-time insight whereas NetSuite reporting provides a set of standard and customizable reports for all transaction types. In order to get desired information quickly, business users can create Workbooks on the fly without writing a single line of code or complex queries. Users can also set custom email or text notifications that may trigger whenever a specific action is taken such as sending email notifications to customers updating them about their shipment status.

Advantages of an ERP system for the Fashion business

NetSuite is an all-around system capable of streamlining every aspect of the entire business including demand planning, eCommerce, inventory management, warehouse management, manufacturing, shipping and more. NetSuite is regarded as the #1 ERP for its scalability and as it remains fully functions even 10 plus years from now. Business owners can implement necessary NetSuite business models at the start while adding additional modules as they keep growing in the later stages.

Advantages of an ERP system for the Fashion business

  • Offering real-time visibility into manufacturing processes, inventory, shipping, CRM, billing and more.
  • Automation of the entire order-to-cash process.
  • Complete CRM functionality to promote cross-selling and upselling. Send reminders, custom alerts and more.
  • Self-service customer portals for a lavish buying experience.
  • A single source that provides complete reporting functionality with the ability to create custom reports for any business model
  • Complete resource planning software
  • Access files and information anytime, anywhere, thanks to NetSuite cloud.
  • Provide an omnichannel buying experience.
  • A fully integrated system & more