In the fast-paced world of fashion and apparel, where trends change in the blink of an eye, the spotlight on design often overshadows the complex processes behind the scenes.

A plethora of back-office challenges – ranging from colour, size and fit handling to seasonality and demand forecasting – cause countless headaches for brands all over the world.

In this article, we’ll explore some of fashion and apparel’s greatest challenges and discuss how they can be resolved.

Colour, size and fit handling

In the fashion industry, brands often produce multiple collections per year. Within each collection, various items require creation in different colours, sizes, and fits.

As a result, companies create thousands and thousands of products per year, and numerous issues could arise without an efficient solution for managing them.

Fortunately, industry bespoke solutions can alleviate this pain, save businesses time, and allow them to get back to producing collections consumers love.

Inventory management

Given the sheer volume of products that fashion brands handle, many companies face difficulty in efficiently managing their inventory, particularly when each item has multiple variants.

Without an effective method for seamlessly managing their inventory, brands will often lose significant time, which could be spent elsewhere on more meaningful tasks.

Brands can, however, utilise a solution with prepack functionality. Prepacks are self-contained items comprising multiple variants. They can be treated as distinct products and easily packed or unpacked as required to enhance flexibility and inventory control.

Lack of standardised processes

While in the past, many brands valued customisation as an essential factor to help tailor solutions to their specific requirements, this is quickly becoming less and less critical.

Heavy customisation often makes systems clunky, leading to inefficiencies, increased costs, and difficulty scaling.

Those who are successful in today’s climate often choose an industry-bespoke solution with the best-in-class, standardised processes to increase operational efficiency and drive business excellence.

Disparate systems

Many fashion and apparel brands still use multiple systems to handle their operational requirements, but like the above challenge, this is starting to cause issues.

Traditional systems that operate in siloes quite easily lead to data discrepancies, hindering the holistic view needed for effective decision-making.

The leading brands have adopted an industry-specific solution seamlessly embedded in their core ERP system to ensure they benefit from a single version of data truth. Crucially, this empowers them with intelligent insights to drive smarter decisions.

Bogged down by external inputs

In a similar vein to the previous challenge, there are still countless brands that rely on external inputs like APIs.

While these often help solve business challenges, they can also create additional problems, like introducing complexities and extra points of failure.

The wisest fashion brands have found solutions that minimise dependence on external integrations to ensure smoother and more reliable operations.

What can fashion and apparel brands do?

Fashion and apparel brands looking to navigate the intricate complexities of back-office processes can find solace in K3’s Fashion Solution Portfolio.

With seamless embedment into the Dynamics 365 technical infrastructures, brands can remove the need to work across different systems while minimising their reliance on external inputs.

And since our solutions have been purposefully built for the industry, brands will also benefit from the best-in-class, standardised functionality to drive their operations forward.

If you’d like to learn more about how K3 can support you, feel free to drop us a line today.