Global Fashion Group: Managing international retail growth with SAP Business ByDesign
As an e-commerce business, a cloud-based ERP made complete sense
The Client
About
Global Fashion Group
Global Fashion Group (GFG) is the leading e-commerce fashion and lifestyle retail destination in Asia Pacific, Latin America and CIS. It connects over 10,000 global, local and own brands to a market of more than one billion consumers through four established e-commerce platforms: THE ICONIC, ZALORA, dafiti and lamoda.
GFG’s focus is to provide inspiring and seamless customer experience enabled by its own technology ecosystem and operational infrastructure. With 17 offices and 10 fulfilment centres across four continents, GFG proudly employs a dynamic and diverse team with deep local knowledge and expertise and is dedicated to being the #1 fashion and lifestyle destination in its markets.
Understanding the Problem
The Challenge
With 50% of GFG already running on SAP, the company needed to bring together various corporate financial systems including its existing accounting and tax tools into one solution with clear and predictable costs. There was also a need for standardised processes across inter-company transactions and compliance with local statutory requirements.
“With half of the business already running on SAP, it was important that our new system would still be from the SAP suite of solutions, whilst also being compact, convenient and cloud-based. It was also imperative that the new system could handle our large number of business entities seamlessly.”
The Solution
Making it Work
GFG selected SAP Business ByDesign with Codestone as its implementation and support partner. With over 40 corporate entities continuously transacting, SAP Business ByDesign enables GFG to manage its financing and accounting for multiple operating units, currencies, and reporting standards.
With a centralised financial system, the SAP solution supports GFG’s steady growth with customer numbers rising by 1 million since the start of this year to over 11 million.
As an e-commerce business, a cloud-based ERP made complete sense. Once we were satisfied with the software and the pricing, and had met the Codestone team, we knew they were the right partner for GFG.
Discover the Benefits
There has been a significant increase in visibility and process efficiency around the management of the Group’s 43 corporate entities, creating a harmony of the business units
GFG’s robust and centralised finance and accounting system now provides clearer and more accurate financial control to support growth plans
The dual-language capability enables our German team to work in their native language and the London office can understand transactions and accounting processes, whilst supporting German colleagues
GFG can now easily manage its multi business units accounting more effectively with a blend of GAAP and IFRS accounting standards and localisation capability
Codestone has been great to work with. The implementation was a success and they were always very responsive on technical matters. I’m really happy that we’re continuing to work with them, both with our support contract and on forthcoming projects such as Concur, the spend management solution.GFG Finance Systems and Controls Manager