Fashion Designer

Rita van der Horst, Fashion Designer

"I am a fashion designer. I create fashion products within a highly skilled team. In order for us to be effective fashion designers, we need to be able to focus. Each diversion costs us time, each distraction means that we will waste time trying to get back into a "creative mental zone". It could be as simple as an email or phone call sometimes, or someone dropping by to ask about a product I designed a year ago. I would like to be enter all of the information anyone in the company could possibly require once. I don't mind spending 5 or 10 minutes doing it, as I will spend days doing it later anyway. But I am only willing to do it once. I don't care who needs to know. It could be the manufacturers, who keep calling me to ask questions I have already answered in emails and specification documents, the distribution guys, the people in the retail organization, or the logistics guys who call me all the time to get a list of materials for customs. Anybody. I don't care. I want to be able to enter it once, in a simple way, for any of my possible creations. And I want it taken care of after that."

The solution: Fashion Product Management, Enterprise Management Framework and Bespoke Development

Demanding? Not for us. Rita's problems are exactly what we solve. Coena provides simple and dynamic solutions for managing fashion products, which are unlike any other product. Fashion products by their very nature are about variety. The creations that are born from the edge of a fashion designer's pencil are like no other. In order to represent and provide information about fashion creations, Coena provides tools that capture the characteristics of any fashion creation in a flexible and simple manner. Designers can create a fashion product once and enter it into an intuitive product management system. This information gets published into Coena's Fashion Content Repository System, which can be installed within your enterprise. This repository is then used to serve the entire enterprise for any information that they need. For instance, for Customs, the system can provide and generate completed Customs forms for a Dress. The sales force can obtain product information from a single source. The buyers can access the same information in the form of an ordering catalog. The warehousing staff can access the product information to determine how and where something should be stored. Some fashion products need special handling in order to make sure they don't get damaged. Other fashion products needs high levels of security, such as jewelry, which can be easily stolen or misplaced.

Buyer

Anne Bryne, Buyer

"I work within an international retail company that has more than a hundred retail outlets globally. I buy both from my internal design organization and from independent fashion designers. It's not an easy job. I need a strong understanding of my market, and I need to know what sells for each season. If I am asked to sum up the main problem in my work, I would start with time. When I know what I need, it never seems to be there! I usually have a good idea of what I need, but I have to search through catalog after catalog of goods. I never know if I have actually seen all that there is to be seen. I don't like working reactively, but I am forced to. I hire people to go and source products for me. I spend a lot of time in the fashion weeks, but I'm never sure I've seen all I need to see. I want to give our retail outlets and customers the best choices. Once I order something, I want to exactly where it is. I don't want to chase anyone around with emails. As I mentioned earlier, my biggest problem is time. And all of my time goes to chasing up people to get statuses, and trying to source the products I need. If someone wants to help me, start by making things easier and quicker for me. I want to spend my time thinking about my work, not running around from crisis to crisis."

The solution: Fashion Product Management, Order Management Framework, Enterprise Management Framework and Bespoke Development

Anne's requirements sound perfectly reasonable to us. In fact, we pride ourselves on being able to make life a lot simpler for our customers. We like working with people that pride themselves on doing a good job, and we like working together with them to form an effective and efficient business operation. We feel that a good software application removes complexity and becomes an integral necessity within the business. It makes the business more cost-effective, makes it a pleasure to work with the system, and removes unnecessary complexity. We provide Buyers with a simple system to quickly search and find specific kinds of fashion products. We offer rich semantic search, allowing Buyers to assemble almost natural language searches to find exactly what they need. For instance, a Buyer can search for "All jeans that are mustard-coloured, have 2 pockets in the back, and have embroidery below the knee". Once a product has been ordered, Buyers can view their performance for products both for their region and other regions (provided they have permission). Products that perform well can be automatically re-ordered.

We pride ourselves on providing solutions that simply the lives of our customers. How can we help you?

Merchandiser

Esther Cavalos, Merchandiser

"I am responsible for displaying products to make sure they get sold. I decide the sections within the store should a product be placed. I decide which products should be placed near each other. I decide which products should be offered together as a package. I work with a small and very experienced team. It is partly science, and part art, and mostly experience. But, to do my job effectively, I need to know about all of the products offered by my organization. I need to know their characteristics (available color ways and sizes) and their every feature. For instance, for a Dress, I would like to know the thickness of the strap, embroidery details, sequins, beading, length of the dress, and every available picture. I would like to have this all organized. In a simple way because I cannot afford wasting time trying to dig around for information. I don't like emailing people around for information, hoping that it will eventually arrive. To do my job effectively, I need to have the information at my fingertips. My team and I would like to be automatically informed when a product with a certain characteristics are approved, and move beyond the designer's pencil to manufacturing. For instance, we know we need mustard-colored jeans with no back pocket. We need to be able to convey this need to our buyers in a standardized way, and I need to know when those jeans will reach a retail outlet. We would like to have a system that we can teach about which combinations of products work well, to make sure it will automatically inform us when it detects those combinations."

The solution : Fashion Product Management, Order Management Framework, Enterprise Management Framework, and Customized Development

Do Esther's requirements seem like a tall order? Not for us. At Coena, we deliver a comprehensive solution for merchandisers to work collaboratively with the rest of the enterprise. Through Coena's Fashion Product Management, a merchandiser can easily search and find products based on their surface and "deep" characteristics. We map every single feature of a fashion product into an intelligent repository, from which merchandisers can have "rich" search, to find products that meet their criteria. Coena offers solutions to build relationships between products, so that merchandisers can associate different types of products together. They can build "selling associations", where combinations of products that sell well together can be fed into the system, and the system would then suggest similar combinations of products.

We understand the challenges a Merchandiser goes through to do their job. We provide the tools necessary for the Merchandiser to focus on what they do best, and leave the hassles of getting all of the information necessary to do their job up to us.

Financial Controller

Joe Grimes, Financial Controller

"Our organization is split into 2 distinct parts. The operational organization and finance. The operational organization is mostly focused on fulfilling the demands of our customers. It is our job to make sure that we have all of the information we need in order to bill our customers. Problems? Where do I start? Okay. How about this? We receive our data from operations for each business transaction, and we bill on each business transaction. 20% of the business transactions have missing or malformed data. I have staff that run around trying to track down the missing data. Some of it is because of faults in operational systems. Some of it is of operational errors by handlers. Despite all this, almost 2% of our business transactions go un-invoiced. Most of my staff are experienced enough to recognize patterns in the missing data, and usually know what has gone wrong and how to fix things. But it takes far too much time, and it is far too expensive to make these changes. Ideally, I would like operational systems to provide complete data, and failing that, I want a system that could capture the knowledge my staff has and automatically fix things that are common knowledge. I want my staff to be able to control this directly, without requiring any development or IT effort, and I want it to be manageable."

The solution : Enterprise Management Framework (Content Management Framework, Ontology Management, Business Rules, and Knowledge Repository) and Customized Development

Coena provides a complete solution for Billing and Invoicing systems. We provide frameworks to integrate and aggregate content. The nature of supply chains are vastly different from other industries such as Banking, Telecommunications, and Insurance. Supply chains are characterized relatively lower volumes of business transactions that tend to span over several days, compared to Banking and Telecommunications which experience much higher volume of business transactions that last a few minutes at most. Coena's Enterprise Management Framework has been specifically built to suit the nature of supply chains. We can gather data from different systems, aggregate them into a single business transaction, and automatically check their consistency using business- defined rules. We provide a visual and conceptual tool that reflects the nature of your business. This representation is simple and easy to understand, minimizing the time required for new users to understand and manage it. Business users use the tool to create rules that can detect discrepancies, report events (derived and extracted from the data), and if necessary, manipulate the data automatically. All of the rules are managed in a logical environment which check their logical consistency and makes sure they are redundant or conflicting with other rules. The collected data is then used to generate invoices into different formats (PDF, SVG, JPG, GIF, RTF, etc.).

Manufacturer

Kanchana Chaipanich, Manufacturer

"Once I know what my customers want, it's easy. The hard part is understanding what they need. My life is spent in front of my email, in meetings, and on the phone. For each product, I get at least 50 emails. Sometimes I get as many as 200. I spend at least 3 hours a day on my phone, and I spend many hours each week in a meeting with my customers. Most of the time, it's status reports and updates. We start off with word documents, images, CAD diagrams flying back and forth. Sometimes I have enough information, but most often I have to contact them with more questions. All of them come to me with a week's notice, and expect me to turn around a shipment within a few days. I would like to be able to plan my manufacturing load a lot more, but the fashion industry doesn't work that way. But I would be able to work so much faster with my customers if they could provide accurate information about what they needed in a simple and consistent way."

The solution: Fashion Product Management, Enterprise Management Framework, Customized Development

Kanchana's requirements seem reasonable enough. And we deliver to them. Using Coena's Product Management system, we allow specifications to be delivered to Manufacturers in a consistent format. Manufacturers get all of the information they need on any product they are required to manufacture. If they need to use materials other than the materials specific in the product in order to meet deadlines, it can be managed through a change request process on the product specification. Structuring the nature of fashion products allow Manufacturers to deliver consistently on demanding timelines.

Customer Service Manager

Dheeraj Kapoor, Customer Service Manager

"I run a 38-person call center to process orders from customers all over the world. These orders come in through the internet, through a print-catalog, tele-sales, and faxes. Every month, we introduce up to 800 new products. It's chaotic. Up to 40% of the products have missing or incomplete information. Very often, we get orders from our Buying organization that need to be changed because they thought they were ordering something else. Very often, they call to ask if we know about a product similar to the one they're ordering. A similar colour, or a similar design. We would like to help, but we don't have access to that information. I don't even know if that information exists anywhere other than the inside of somebody's head! My performance is judged by sales volumes and how quickly we handle calls. If we did have this information, we could sell so much more, and faster. I would like all of my staff to have 5 kinds of information available to them. The customer's order information, the products the customer has ordered, the customer's account information, exactly what the status of the order is and where it is now, and finally, what products or services we could sell in addition to the product the customer has ordered. But don't give me any clutter. I hate cluttered solutions that try to do everything."

The solution : Order Management, Fashion Product Management, Enterprise Management Framework, and Bespoke Development

Coena builds solutions for people just like Dheeraj. Coena provides a semantically-rich and intelligent fashion product repository that stores product information in a highly-flexible XML format. The fashion product repository makes sure that any product information published to it is complete and comprehensive for the whole enterprise. Customer service representatives view product information for an order, along with products that are similar, related, or could be of interest to the customer. At Coena, we believe in simplicity, and we give our customers just enough to do their job thoroughly. Our solutions can be implemented within weeks, rather than months, giving a hectic business environment an early and effective solution rather than waiting months. We also integrate with the leading CRM vendors, giving you the flexibility to use Coena's knowledge of fashion with your existing infrastructure. We provide track and trace solutions that integrate with your existing warehousing solutions, transportation systems, logistics providers, and shipment handlers. When a customer calls with the simple question, "Where is my order?", you can now give a precise answer.

e-Commerce Officer

Ken Leung, E-Commerce Officer

"We have an online shop today. We were under tremendous pressure a few years ago to go online, mostly perhaps because our competitors were going online. We got a few proposals in from the best new media agencies around, and built a gorgeous looking web-shop. That's all it really is today. There is no supply chain behind it. We want to run our online presence the way we would run an ideal retail organization. We want our storefronts to look great, and have the right promotions to get customers in. We want our displays easy to find, and we want a professional merchandiser to arrange products on online catalogs. Just the way we do it in our stores. We would like to have a solid supply chain behind our e-Commerce engine. We want our online sales to be built on the strength of our existing retail infrastructure. Design agencies and pure Web 2.0 companies seem to have a very poor understanding of what a supply chain entails. They seem to think its as simple as integrating with a "Back-end" System to get SKUs. When a customer comes online, selects an item of clothing, and is then informed that "This item is unavailable", or "There is a lead time of 2 months for this product", it is an embarrassment. Imagine if we ran our stores this way. All we have today is an online presence and a pretty web site. Not much else. I want the entire online retail experience to reflect the experience of going to one of our retail outlets."

The solution: Fashion Product Management, Enterprise Management Framework, Webshop Framework, and Customized Development.

Tall order? Not for us. We do a lot more than just build "pretty websites". We build the supply chains behind them. We have a long track record for providing end-to-end solutions for e-Commerce that reflect a business reality. We regard online retail as another channel, and we use the existing strengths of a brick and mortar business to build an online experience. We offer real-time inventory integration with an e-Commerce engine, to the extent that it is possible to determine if an item is in stock even before a consumer adds it to the shopping cart. Branding is critical for an online site, but a large part of its branding is its supply chain effectiveness to ensure that an online sales channel has repeated visits and purchases.

You've gone online, but you're missing your supply chain punch? Let us put that punch in.

Inventory Manager

Pat Baker, Inventory Manager

"It's always a crisis here. And we've tried solving problems our own way through a combination of database-based solutions and excel-spreadsheets. If there is a word that sums up my career, it's firefighting. We usually process up to 50,000 orders a day. I manage a network of 4 regional warehouses, managed from a single distribution centre. I want my stock smartly distributed. We see specific kinds of demand from specific areas of the globe. Although trends in fashion are very hard to predict, we do see some patterns in consumption. I want to be able to stock my regional distribution centers in the northern hemisphere with beachwear in the summer. An especially cold winter can be predicted months in demand, and I would like to have high-volume winter goods that are not dependent on trends in my regional warehouses. Shipping everything from a single distribution centre has its advantages, but it can get very expensive. I would also like to know what kinds of products stored in each location. Sometimes I would like reports on a more general level, and sometimes on a more specific level. For instance, we recently started doing watches, and they tend to be higher value than most of my other stock. I would like to know how many high-value items there are in any of our warehouses at any time. I want to be able to know the total value of goods in the warehouse at any given time. I would like Inventory summaries both by the types of products, such as clothing, footwear, or hosiery, and by specific types of products, such as the new bikini-line. I would like a really simple solution to solve all this, but it shouldn't be one of those projects with armies of consultants! I need something working in 3 months."

The solution: Fashion Product Management, Enterprise Management Framework, Inventory Management Framework, and Customized Development

Pat has a lot of demanding requirements, and we meet them all. The heart of our solution embraces the nature of the fashion industry. Our inventory solutions allow you to manage inventory by different categories (e.g. clothing, footwear, accessories, hosiery, etc.), by value, by handling requirements (fragile, flammable, etc.), and by dimensions. Coena's inventory management solution for fashion allows a business user to make business and decision rules on how and where products should be stocked. Strategic planning of inventory will be possible on the basis of accurate information from multiple warehousing locations. Stock levels of each distribution center, depot, and warehouse can be strategically planned on the basis of historic and forecasted demand. Coena's collaboration solutions also allows Buyers and Inventory Managers to work together to stock each location smartly. A collection of retail outlets in a regional area managed by a Buyer can collaborate with the global inventory manager to stock regional distribution centers to anticipate demand.

We can help Pat stop reacting and firefighting. How can we help you?

Procurement Officer

Patricia Ray, Procurement Officer

"Procurement in the fashion industry is very different from procurement in other industries. I've been working in enterprise procurement for 18 years, mostly in the automotive and electronics industry. 5 years ago, I became the Procurement Officer in a large fashion company. I was hired to fundamentally make Procurement more cost-effective while preserving the diversity of choice a competitive fashion company requires. I've learnt a lot of lessons on the way. I started out by trying to shape our supplier relationships the way they are shaped in the electronics industry. I tried to do this through having fewer suppliers, demanding SLAs, and raw material re-use for different products. It was successful to some extent, but it wasn't enough. The biggest lesson for me has been that fashion is different. Fashion requires diversity, and it needs a broad variety of materials. We deal with a few hundred product lines, thousands of products, and millions in inventory. All of this is prone to frequent change, as the nature of the fashion industry is driven by new products introduced frequently. I realized that trying to enforce a solution that reduces the variety and diversity would only result in reducing our competitiveness. Some of our suppliers are large companies, but most of our suppliers are small to medium sized companies with very little IT infrastructure. A large part of our procurement processes are manual, simply because our suppliers do not have an electronic infrastructure. In an ideal world, I would want to be able to procure a wide variety of raw materials, fabrics, and products from a competitive list of suppliers. I want to build this list based on ability and quality, not on the organizational constraints on IT infrastructure. Anyone can build me a solution with fewer suppliers working in a standardized way. Build me something that allows me to work with any supplier, big or small, in the same way, with little or no effort from myself. That's my perfect world."

The solution: Fashion Product Management, Enterprise Management Framework, Procurement Management Framework, and Customized Development

We understand people like Patricia. We respect that they want to create a competitive business that doesn't compromise on the needs of products that require different materials from different suppliers. Coena provides collaboration solutions for procurement, allowing a large enterprise to integrate with both small and large businesses. For your smaller-sized suppliers, Coena provides a lightweight platform with which they can manage their product offering, pricing, and inventory. For a larger business, Coena offers integration with existing solutions that they already have, or an enterprise platform to manage their product offerings, pricing structures, and inventory management. For both of your small and large suppliers, Coena offers solutions to search if your suppliers can provide a specific product, raw material, or component within a specified requirement (quality, time, SLA). Once you find the right supplier for the requirement, you can manage the entire procurement cycle from ordering to returns, with the same management interface, for both of your large and small suppliers. Finally, you can rate your suppliers, create business rules for automated procurement, and manage your procurement cycles through automated processes.

Transportation Manager

Henry Giles, Transportation Manager

"We manage a global distribution center, which receives inbound shipments from 2 manufacturing locations, and we make outbound shipments to 2000 locations around the world. My 2 biggest problems are the lack of choice for choosing carriers, and the lack of control I have on my shipments. A single carrier is typically better than others in a specific part of the world. Sometimes a carrier is better than others in handling a certain kind of product. And some carriers are much better than others at fulfilling the service level agreements (SLAs) we have with them. We currently work with 6 carriers, but in a perfect world, I would rather deal with 20! But there is a huge cost in establishing a relationship with a carrier, as we have to adjust to their way of working. We have to integrate with their proprietary standards. We have to understand their services, and then we have to map it to what we want. This is why I work with 6 carriers. And believe me, it's already painful. I don't know where my shipments are. Each carrier has their own status codes, I don't have the tools to track and trace all of my carriers universally. In the perfect world, I would like to have a pool of carriers. I would like to have decision rules which base my criteria for selecting a carrier. When there is a shipment, I want the system to automatically figure out which carrier the best for the job based on the rules I have taught it, and it would automatically notify the carrier. I want to have global visibility on my shipments, both Inbound and Outbound, and I want to know where anything is at any given moment of time."

The solution : Enterprise Management Framework (Ontology Management, Enterprise Integration), Enterprise Visibility, Logistics Management, and Customized Development

We think we could bring Henry quite close to his perfect world. Coena provides a decision making framework for selecting carriers which reflects the nature of Henry's business, and allows him to choose his own criteria for selecting a carrier. Cost. Speed. Consistency. Value of the Relationship with the Carrier. It's totally up to him. He can track and trace any inbound and outbound shipment through an intuitive interface that can easily add new carriers. Through its Logistics Management Framework, it can integrate with a variety of large global carriers. It also provides a lightweight platform for integrating smaller regional players, who may not even have a messaging format. The key value Coena provides is being able to mirror the nature of your business, your relationships with logistics providers, and providing a simple and business configurable way to manage any number of carriers. Imagine a person that knows the best carrier for each specific type of job. This person knows which carriers would be best to handle a fragile and high-value product. This person knows which carriers would be best to get the shipment on time, in the most cost-effective way, to global destinations. Now imagine a system that reflects all of the knowledge this person has, and can handle and process thousands of shipments an hour using this knowledge. This is the essence of Coena's logistics offering.