Success Story | European Fashion Brand Scales Global Wholesale Business with SAP S/4HANA for Fashion
Overview
A leading European fashion and lingerie brand with a strong retail presence across multiple countries was looking to expand into new markets and business models, including international wholesale and franchise operations. While historically focused on direct-to-consumer sales, the brand identified wholesale as a major growth lever.
To support this transition, the brand needed to modernize its ERP landscape without increasing headcount or disrupting ongoing operations across its growing footprint.
Objectives
The company’s legacy SAP IS-Retail platform had been tailored for a store-centric model and could no longer support its multi-channel ambitions. To enable strategic expansion, the organization outlined three key goals:
- Achieve double-digit growth in the wholesale segment
- Transition to a modern ERP platform capable of supporting advanced wholesale, franchise, and retail processes
- Align business processes with fashion industry best practices in planning, buying, order management, and fulfillment
Key Challenges
- Limited wholesale functionality in legacy IS-Retail system restricted scalability through partner channels
- Lack of wholesale-specific fashion processes hindered flexible buying, fulfillment, and inventory visibility
- Overdependence on spreadsheets and manual workflows slowed planning and execution
- Inability to meet wholesale customer needs led to missed growth opportunities
- Concurrent system upgrade and transformation efforts created a highly compressed project timeline
- The transformation needed to be completed without increasing headcount, while supporting growth across multiple regions and formats
Leading European Fashion & Lingerie Brand
SAP S/4HANA Fashion | Wholesale Transformation
A prominent European fashion brand partnered with Applexus to modernize its SAP landscape and scale its wholesale business. While the core system was being upgraded to S/4HANA Fashion, Applexus developed wholesale functionality in parallel on its own environment to meet tight timelines. The solution eliminated manual processes, enabled an on-time go-live, and positioned the brand for double-digit wholesale growth without increasing headcount. This joint transformation, grounded in fashion-aligned process redesign and continuous partnership, is now a strategic foundation for the company’s global wholesale scale-up.
What We Did
To meet ambitious growth goals while undergoing a core system upgrade, the project was executed in phases:
- Phase 0: Migrated the legacy IS-Retail system to SAP Suite on HANA under a RISE contract, led by SAP and supported by an AMS partner. This created a stable foundation for the S/4HANA Fashion migration.
- Phase 1: The technical conversion from ECC IS-Retail on RISE to S/4HANA for Fashion was carried out by the incumbent AMS provider.
- Phase 2: Applexus led the redesign and enablement of wholesale and fashion-specific capabilities, leveraging industry expertise, prebuilt tools, and an agile delivery approach to reduce risk and accelerate deployment.
Applexus developed key functionality within its own SAP development environment and later migrated the solution to the client’s S/4HANA system, allowing for parallel development and efficient user acceptance testing.
The transformation was guided by the fashion lifecycle–aligned best practices to ensure relevance across seasonal workflows, assortment planning, and order fulfillment.
Wholesale and Fashion Functionality Deployed
- Flexible Purchase Commitment: Streamlined wholesale buying with adaptable procurement strategies that support fluctuating order volumes
- Advanced ATP with Supply Protection & Backorder Processing: Increased fulfillment accuracy by intelligently managing stock availability, demand prioritization, and delivery commitments
- Multistore Ordering and Hybrid Fulfillment: Enabled smooth execution of diverse order scenarios, improving operational efficiency across channels and regions
- Fiori Apps for Large Order Management: Empowered business users to efficiently manage high-volume orders with intuitive, streamlined interfaces
- Change Management and Process Redesign: Accelerated transformation by equipping teams with modern workflows and guiding them through the shift from manual to digital
These enhancements helped the client to eliminate spreadsheet-based monitoring and forecasting achieving full automation from order capture through fulfillment- reducing manual effort and enabling scalability without additional staffing.
Key Applexus Differentiators
- Preconfigured S/4HANA Fashion Solution: Applexus used its ready-to-deploy fashion solution to showcase wholesale capabilities early and accelerate business alignment
- Parallel Development Strategy: Development was carried out in Applexus’ own system and seamlessly migrated into the client’s environment to meet tight deadlines
- Deep Domain Expertise in Fashion and Wholesale: Our team brought real-world fashion and wholesale knowledge to design practical, industry-aligned solutions
- End-to-End Change Management Support: We supported users through the transition with training and a focus on user adoption from day one
- Close Collaboration with Multiple Stakeholders: Applexus coordinated closely with the AMS partner, IT, and business teams to ensure a smooth and unified delivery
Key Outcomes
The brand is now live on S/4HANA for Fashion with fully integrated wholesale capabilities
- All Q1 2026 wholesale orders are now live and processed entirely in SAP
- Significant reduction in manual effort, no more spreadsheets
- Process automation now drives planning, order capture, and fulfillment across wholesale accounts
- Improved ability to meet wholesale partner expectations and avoid lost sales
- Targeted double-digit wholesale growth unlocked without increasing headcount
- Adoption of industry best practices and streamlined, scalable processes
To support continuous transformation, the brand has retained Applexus as a strategic partner to further unlock value from the SAP S/4HANA Fashion platform and explore additional SAP innovations in future phases.
Expanding our wholesale business was a strategic priority, but we needed the right technology foundation to scale efficiently, and S/4HANA Fashion was the ideal choice. Applexus helped us turn a complex transformation into a growth enabler- delivering the wholesale capabilities we needed, fast.
CTO - Global Fashion Brand