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French Connection

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French Connection are renowned as an innovative fashion designer and retailer, and operate in both retail and wholesale markets. FCUK designs, produces and distributes branded fashion clothing for men and women to more than 30 countries around the world.

French Connection Group Plc operates under four principal brands, the most significant of which is French Connection, accounting for around 85% of global turnover. Other brands include the well-known designer label, Nicole Farhi, a mail-order based ladies fashion range, TOAST, and a fashion basics range, Great Plains. Although the brands target different audiences they each generate high levels of respect in their chosen markets reflecting the passion and skill poured into the design and manufacture of the products.

Founded in 1969 by Chairman and Chief Executive Stephen Marks the business has grown steadily to its current size. French Connection’s long history of success has been based on the quality of the fashions, supported by highly successful advertising and marketing for the French Connection brand and the FCUK branding resulting in
one of the most highly recognised and respected clothing brands in the UK.

The Problem

French Connection had previously operated a number of disparate, legacy systems which suffered from a lack of data consistency and reliability.

As a trend-driven fashion retailer, French Connection relies heavily on the preferences of its customers to shape its design and manufacturing processes for coming seasons. With the legacy systems that FCUK had been using, a complete and integrated view of sales, stock, and profits was largely unavailable. The excessive manual checking required to collect store data had become extremely difficult to manage and was highly unsuitable to French Connection’s needs.

The Solution

French Connection chose to become the first retailer in the UK to implement SAP for Retail. The company recognised the benefits that an integrated, process-oriented solution could deliver to their stores.

Next, they determined the most important elements of the upgrade to be a single view of stock, a single view of projected sales, and the ability to have buying and retail operations on the same page.

The Choice

French Connection selected SAP to help them meet these key goals for financial and retail management and to replace existing systems, based upon the high value proposition of SAP for Retail.

CIBER worked with SAP to design, configure and implement both financial and retail management modules, integrating them with legacy Wholesale Management and Point Of Sale systems. CIBER also delivered data migration routines to automatically transfer product and inventory data into SAP for Retail, and open items into accounts receivable and payable.

CIBER was able to meet the challenging goal of implementing the first SAP for Retail system in the UK in just six months.

The Benefits

CIBER hold up the FCUK project as an example of what can be achieved through commitment and determination.

Colin Vickery, SAP Retail Consultancy Manager states, “Together with CIBER and French Connection, we delivered a working solution for a large and complex business in a timescale not normally associated with a project of this scope.”

Roy Tomlinson, Managing Director of CIBER UK says, “The French Connection project proves that organisations can be both pragmatic and professional in the implementation of large SAP projects which impact many areas of their business. At French Connection, we proved that it is possible to respond to the need to deliver a complex and business critical solution in a relatively short period of time.”

About CIBER UK

CIBER is a leading SAP consultancy providing world-wide support for a range of high profile clients in the retail sector. We have maintained our reputation as the world's leading SAP Retail implementation partner ever since being the first partner to implement SAP Retail when it was launched in 1996.

CIBER ’s success in the UK has been built on the retail industry’s main priority today: integration of systems, data and processes to provide a seamless retail management and customer experience across multiple channels. Our customers include numerous high profile brand names such as The Big Food Group, B&Q, Direct Wines, Dunelm Mill, French Connection, Goldsmiths, and Halfords.

CIBER is part of CIBER, Inc. (NYSE: CBR), a leading international systems integration consultancy providing superior value-priced services to both private and government sector clients. CIBER’s global delivery services are offered on a project or strategic staffing basis, in both custom and enterprise resource planning (ERP) package environments, and across all technology platforms, operating systems and infrastructures. CIBER serves client businesses from over 60 U.S. offices, 20 European offices and four offices in Asia, operates in 18 countries with 8,500 employees, and has an annual revenue of more than approximately $1.2 billion million. CIBER is included in the Russell 2000 Index and the S&P Small Cap 600 Index.