Matrix items and variant inventory
One style with every color and size as a sellable variant, with stock, cost and sales reported at the style and the SKU.
Apparel ERP software that keeps styles, colors and sizes, seasonal lines, retailer EDI and wholesale and direct orders in the same system as purchasing, inventory and financials.
Why apparel brands call us
Most apparel and footwear brands come to us at the same point: the line sheet lives in a spreadsheet, available-to-sell is a guess across sizes, retailer EDI runs through a portal someone re-keys from, and the D2C store and the wholesale book never agree on what is in the warehouse.
SAP Business One for apparel replaces that patchwork with one system for styles and matrix items, seasonal collections and pre-orders, purchasing from contract manufacturers, inventory by warehouse and 3PL, EDI, wholesale and direct orders and financials, configured around how a brand actually sells.
Requirements
Eight areas where apparel ERP software earns its keep, and the ones we configure first.
One style with every color and size as a sellable variant, with stock, cost and sales reported at the style and the SKU.
Line sheets by season, pre-order books that reserve stock before it lands, and drops that ship on the date promised.
Orders in, ship notices and invoices out for department stores and specialty retailers, with routing guides and chargebacks tracked.
Shopify and marketplace orders beside the wholesale book, allocated against the same inventory so nothing is sold twice.
Reserve by customer and channel, see available-to-sell by size, and stop the oversell before it reaches the warehouse.
Freight, duty and agent fees allocated to the styles they arrived with, so margin by SKU is real.
Returns against the original order, restocking by size, and markdowns that flow to margin reports.
Reps and retail buyers order from live availability and see their invoices and shipments without calling.
Garment and apparel manufacturing
Brands that cut and sew, or that manage contract manufacturers closely, add production to the same system: bills of materials by size, cut tickets, work orders at a contractor, and costing that shows what each style cost to make against what it sold for.
DRI Duck Traders, a Kansas outdoor workwear manufacturer, prepared its systems for growth on SAP Business One with product-quality data integrated and shared with customers.
The Third Wave build
SAP Business One already covers purchasing, inventory, sales, warehouse and financials. What makes it a fashion ERP is the configuration and the add-ons around it. A typical Third Wave apparel build includes:
Every build starts with your line sheet, your trading partners and your warehouses, not a template.
Sub-sectors
Different categories, the same operating problems: variants that multiply, seasons that do not wait, and retailers with their own rules.
DRI Duck Traders runs its growing workwear business on SAP Business One with quality data integrated end to end.
Havaianas (Alpargatas USA) scaled its US distribution of flip flops, espadrilles and sneakers on a unified inventory backbone.
OGI Eyewear automated inventory planning and cut accounting time after its first partner walked away.
Department store EDI beside a Shopify store, allocated against one inventory.
Cut-and-sew production, BOMs by size and contractor work orders in the same system as the sales book.
Container imports, landed cost and pre-order books for brands that source overseas.
Client results
Three brands, three categories, one system.
DRI Duck Traders
Kansas-based outdoor workwear brand DRI Duck Traders moved to SAP Business One with Third Wave so growth would not outpace capacity. EDI was running within a few months.
Havaianas (Alpargatas USA)
How Havaianas (Alpargatas USA) added Argentis Apparel and Footwear and a RepSpark ordering site to SAP Business One with Third Wave: more than 3,000 product variations handled, live in two months, and stockouts eliminated.
OGI Eyewear
OGI Eyewear's first SAP partner went out of business shortly after launch. Third Wave took over the project, brought OGI live on January 1, 2010, and OGI now plans inventory, tracks product lifespans and pulls the reports management asks for.
Client reviews
I like Third Wave Business systems as they are able to either come up with solutions or have suggested partners we can work with that will help our business. They are constantly innovating and staying ahead to give our business another way to utilize SAP B1 better and more efficiently connect with our customers.
They are responsive, consistent, and thorough; they are able and willing to examine the underlying business process to best understand which technological options will address the true need.
How to choose
Most lists of the best apparel ERP rank vendors. The better test is whether the system can hold your matrix, allocate by size and take retailer EDI without a spreadsheet beside it. Five questions settle it.
If the answer is an export, oversells will keep reaching the warehouse.
Ask to see an 850 land as a sales order and an 856 go back, on your trading partner, not on a slide.
Margin by SKU is fiction until freight, duty and agent fees are allocated to what arrived.
Licenses, implementation, add-ons and hosting. Our SAP Business One pricing guide lays out the ranges for a brand and what moves them.
Migrating styles, open pre-orders and trading partners moves the date more than order volume. Our implementation timeline guide covers the phases, and the client results above show the brands we have taken live.
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