Elie Tahari Tackles Consumer Trends

An excerpt from "Smart Data for High Fashion" published by RIS News in April 2009.

For more than 30 years, high fashion brand Elie Tahari (www.elietahari.com) has attracted men and women across the world, and today has a presence in more than 40 countries. As a global fashion designer,  Elie Tahari was challenged to gain accurate visibility into its supply chain and keep up with customer demand for its changing clothing line based on the season's trends and geography. Employees engaged in the time consuming process of running several reports from different systems. They would then manually piece the information together to make sense of trends, market demands, financial and product availability. By the time the manual reports were compiled, new data was generated or changed in the systems, which made these manually prepared Excel sheets obsolete.

Gaining Visibility

In order to address these insufficiencies, the designer added IBM Cognos Business Intelligence (BI) (www.cognos.com), which helps identify the best-selling sizes across product lines, popularity and demand for a particular item, or colors in fashion for the season. The system even incorporates pictures and PDF files into reports, so managers can see actual images of merchandise.

"The IBM business intelligence system has significantly helped us gain visibility into our customer's needs," says Nihad Aytaman, director of business applications, Elie Tahari. All employees can now view the same data across the enterprise, in any part of the world.

Retail managers, designers and merchandisers now have detailed information on buying patterns in different parts of the world, so they can ensure they have the optimal assortment of merchandise to satisfy customers. The BI system provides online access to the key transactional systems -- orders, warehouse, financials, production, point-of-sale and channel sales.

Sales associates searching for specific stock across the distributed supply chain can now quickly pinpoint the item in need, determine the location and order new shipments to minimize the financial impact of carrying out-of-stock merchandise.

The Perfect Fit

Since implementing IBM Cognos BI, the company can more effectively target new customers and boosted sales by more than 10 percent, while cutting operating costs. Additionally, Elie Tahari has achieved more than 30 percent savings in managing its supply chain and the transfer of merchandise from warehouse to store.

Elie Tahari is even fulfilling its global expansion goals to serve several key international markets including Kuwait. The new platform has enabled the global sales team to have instant access to unified and standardized reports to meet shifting customers' needs.

"With efficiencies that have been brought into our day-to-day transactions, this system has saved Elie Tahari several millions of dollars annually and has paid for itself many times over," closes Aytaman.