For its new logistics centre, HUGO BOSS is relying on SAP EWM with SAP AFS

FILDERSTADT, 4 July The Hugo Boss fashion group has spent €100 million on securing its growth opportunities for the coming years with a new logistics centre – moving articles through the system remarkably quickly, and allowing fashion stores across Europe to be supplied within a maximum of 48 hours. In extreme cases, socks delivered by truck can be transferred in fifteen minutes to another truck, together with shirts and ties, to exactly match the needs of a particular business, already labelled with a price tag and equipped with anti-theft protection.

"Our stores are located in some of the most expensive locations in the world," explains Claus-Dietrich Lahrs, CEO of Hugo Boss AG – that is to say: locations that are too expensive to be wasted on storage, and the employees shouldn't have to worry about the pricing but should instead devote themselves to serving the customers. It was also important that everything that has been sold out be immediately replenished: If a customer finds a suit he likes, but then can't find a matching shirt, this doesn't fit well with the successful Boss retailing model.

"If we didn't have the logistics centre, we would very quickly have reached the limits of our own retail growth," Boss CEO Lahrs goes as far as saying. Whereas Boss was once a pure fashion manufacturer that supplied wholesalers twice annually, Boss now sells more than half of its products in its own stores and brings out twelve collections per year. By 2015, Boss intends to increase revenue to €3 billion: by then, Boss will be selling 80% of its goods in own-label shops.

Boss also describes the siting of its Filderstadt-based distribution centre – the most modern in Europe, Boss claims – as ideal: just a few miles away in each case from its Head Office, Stuttgart's airport and a major motorway intersection. Externally, the building measures 122 m wide and 270 metres long. The logistics centre will initially employ a workforce of 250 people.

Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung