case scenario

Brooks Brothers is the oldest mens clothing company in the United States, founded nearly 200 years ago in Manhattan. However, they wanted to expand their business to lifestyle brand than just clothing. Brooks Brothers started by analysing its global technology infrastructure to identify critical gaps as part of a program called Brooks Brothers Global Transformation. One area that it discovered needed improvement was its global supply chain system. Its legacy systems were not yet suited to the omni-channel world of business today. Customers today are shopping at retail stores, online e-commerce sites, mobile e-commerce sites, and mobile app stores. Organising the data generated by all these different types of sales channels was an area Brooks Brothers needed to improve.

To solve this problem, Brooks Brothers turned to SAPs Global Supply Chain System. Applying individual modules to specific retail areas, such as apparel and footwear, the SAP system allowed Brooks Brothers to gain deeper insight into inventory and financial reports in real time. The company implemented SAPs Customer Activity Repository application to establish a state of the art database that integrated fully with the rest of its SAP CRM implementation.

Your tasks:

Using relevant academic literature (i.e., journals) and the theories/concepts studied in the course, include the following in your report. You are allowed to make assumptions.

a. Describe what is SCM and the importance of SCM for Brook Brothers.

b. Discuss the business processes in relation to SCM and justify, by reference to theories and

concepts studied, improvements that can be made to the processes.

c. Describe and discuss the use of Business intelligence at Brook Brothers to manage relationships with customers.

d. Describe and discuss in relation to the identified business processes how Brook Brothers can use omni-channel in their business.