Hela Apparel Holdings has announced to complete the first phase of its global implementation of SAP S/4HANA®, an enterprise application suite developed by SAP. With this, Hela becomes the first company to implement SAP S/4HANA® for fashion and vertical business in Sri Lanka.
The implementation is part of Hela’s drive towards digitalisation for enhanced productivity, efficiency and sustainability. In 2021, the company partnered with attune – a Rizing company, and leading SAP solutions provider for fashion and lifestyle industries, to support this process.
Following a 16-month preparation period, the digital solution has now been taken live in the Hela Kidswear cluster and is expected to be fully implemented across all parts of the business by March 2023.
This is said to transform the company’s operations by enabling real-time inventory visibility and order confirmations, and is expected to further improve on-time delivery performance.
Sanath Amaratunga, CEO of Hela Kidswear, commented “We expect our digital transformation journey to help us be more data-driven and agile, placing us in a stronger position to navigate the challenges ahead while strengthening our value proposition. The implementation of SAP S/4HANA® at Hela Kidswear offers greater opportunities for continuous innovation and cloud readiness.”
According to Hela, SAP S/4HANA® can be seamlessly integrated with other applications to further streamline processes across its operations. To this end, Hela signed an enterprise agreement with H-One to host SAP S/4HANA® on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform earlier this year, while Atria will provide the company with a cutting-edge suite of business analytics by connecting SAP with Microsoft Power BI through a Microsoft Azure Data Factory.
SAP S/4HANA® will be integrated with a number of the existing digital systems in place across Hela, including Coats Digital Fast React Systems – a garment production planning software, and a digital HR solution built by MiHCM. Hela has also designed and developed its own state-of-the-art Manufacturing Execution System, which is tightly integrated with the SAP platform to provide factory floor visibility and insights. This solution provides a digital scanning platform based on QR codes within all of the plant material flow operations, capturing real-time production updates.
Ruwanthi Fernando, Chief Information & Process Officer for Hela, mentioned “Our IT platform is key to driving our strategy by supporting innovation, digitalisation and scalability. Digitising end-to-end processes with a digital core empowered by SAP S/4HANA® and other integrations has given us the transparency and flexibility we need to future-proof the business and support our continued growth. We look forward to rolling out these solutions to the rest of the company in the coming months. This will allow us to facilitate greater innovation and help us meet the rapidly evolving market conditions and global supply chain disruptions that require real-time decision making.”
