Fabindia

Fabindia is one of India’s biggest names in Retail. The brand markets a range of products from Women and Men Garments, Home Furnishings, Organic Food and Bodycare brands. Women’s apparel remains to be synonymous with the Brand across the country.

Our work was to design and develop a custom business process management software, called FABCONNECT. The ERP solution, with annual version launches, has been instrumental in keeping the business ahead of competition, delivering business growth and managing product expansion. Since launch, Fabindia has grown from 38 stores in 2004, to 332 stores today, and is looking at a Stock Exchange listing in 2022.

In keeping with the dynamic growth of the business and its unique model of working directly with the artisans of the country (later a HBS Case Study), the IT strategy of the organization needed to be conceived and structured as a bespoke requirement across the organization.

Supply Chain at Fabindia is dependent on artisans and job workers and the manufacturing processes are not mill-based or machine driven, as a result:

• Processes can’t be standardized or benchmarked against industry’s best practices.
  • Exceptions are usually the norm.
  • From Concept to In-Store, each process in supply chain relies on flexibility within the FI systems to manage and support exceptions at all levels (Purchase, SCM, Finance etc).
  • No standard ERP software packages cater to Exception Automation.
• Fabindia deals with more than 100K artisans most of which are neither tech savvy nor process oriented. Managing supplies from such sources across India brings in complexities like:
  • Huge range (width instead of depth) - 180K SKUs at any given point in time.
  • Managing this range without an ERP solution that also caters to exception was impossible.
  • Custom Automation was required at all levels to support and manage the Supply Chain.

Enterprise-wide custom ERP and BI development with Supply Chain; Point of Sale; Product Management; Inventory Management; Vendor Management; Manufacturing; and integration of Omnichannel, CRM, HRMS and Finance solutions. Together the ERP solution is called FABCONNECT.

Further, the ERP has been successfully integrated with Oracle Fusion (Finance), Ramco (HRMS), Easy Rewards (CRM) and varied other smaller systems required for various needs. Today, version 8.0 is in use across the business.

At a glance:

• Nationwide solution, across all departments of the Business:
  • Product Mgmt.
  • Vendor Mgmt.
  • Supply Chain Automation.
  • Logistics Management.
  • Store Operations.
  • OmniChannel Backend etc.
• Flexible supply chain management with predictive algorithms.
• The platform integrates various applications and process, gets your teams working together, and reduces workload, error and cost.
• Data volume of over 30,000 invoices/ day; and over 100,000 Stock transactions/day.
• Infrastructure management of the central MIS server.