Overview

Carhartt was looking to streamline how data from licensed goods (goods being manufactured by partners with Carhartt’s logo) was exchanged, processed, validated, and ultimately sold on carhartt.com and syndicated out to other sales channels. The process was slow, disconnected, error-prone, and didn’t provide the best experience for either Carhartt or their partners. This ultimately led to lost sales and dissatisfied customers.

Key Challenges

Bob Demetter, Manager of Master Data Management at Carhartt, set out to automate this end-to-end process and improve the data quality and flexibility between their partners, internal employees, and Carhartt’s ecommerce website. The challenges ahead of him were how to:

• Ingest external data from 3rd parties into SAP
• Provide visibility into the process with internal & external parties
• Validate and consolidate the inbound data to make sure it had integrity with the source and followed the correct format
• Apply data quality rules automatically to assist in product information creation
• Syndicate the data to Carhartt’s ecommerce website, stores and channel partners
• Govern the process and the data, supported by process visibility and data quality metrics

Solution

CPS provided the ability for Carhartt’s partners to email a standard Excel file containing all material information needed to create licensed goods in SAP. The email kicked off an internal workflow allowing all participants to provide relevant data. CPS also built automated data quality rules to validate and consolidate inbound data, ensuring integrity with the source and correct formatting. If data was missing, an automated email would go back to Carhartt’s partner to request additional information. Finally, the data entry into SAP was automated and all parties were notified when the licensed goods material was created.

In summary, the solution ingests external data from 3rd parties into SAP, governs the process and data, and syndicates product information to Carhartt’s ecommerce website, stores, and channel partners.

Results

The solution CPS put together for Carhartt has streamlined and automated their business processes. It has allowed the business to do what it does best while focusing on what’s most important.

• 100% customer satisfaction
• 50% reduction in overall process time
• 100% decreased mass BOM request processing time