Christian Louboutin selects Infor Fashion cloud suite to optimise value chain

Infor's Fashion toolset allows users to 'manage the entire fashion process' from design all the way to retail

Luxury shoe designer Christian Louboutin has selected Infor Fashion, the cloud-based suite of products specifically designed for the fashion industry, to optimise its value chain.

Infor's Fashion toolset allows users to "manage the entire fashion process" from design all the way to retail. The world famous shoe designer opted for the Infor suite because it believes the flexibility of the cloud solution will help it better address global business issues.

Louboutin's deployment of Infor comes shortly after luxury lingerie designer Groupe Chantelle deployed Box cloud collaboration tools across its marketing and manufacturing teams.

Louboutin wants to use the suite of tools as part of a new unified management system as it continues to expand across the globe.

"With the opening of more than 100 new stores in 20 countries in the last seven years, the company has changed radically; this evolutionary project and harmonization of our management processes demonstrates the evolution and transformation of the group," said Jean-François Roncatti, SVP of logistics and group CIO at Christian Louboutin.

"Moreover, the upheaval taking place today in the world of distribution, with the development of omni-channel, is an additional constraint that we have had to integrate in order to satisfy our customers," he added.

Louboutin's tender process for a new global business solution lasted nearly a year, with Infor selected ahead of "three major market players". Infor's international presence and its experience in the luxury fashion sector were cited as key reasons why Louboutin selected the company.

"We had high expectations of our partners in terms of R&D investment in order to closely match to our expectations," said Roncatti.

"The omni-channel management capabilities and performance of merchandising tools within Infor Fashion; the capabilities of its financial management solution; the integrated management control, as well as the quality of the project and support teams that are committed to us - whilst providing a standard solution that meets our needs, convinced us," he said.

Infor's automated allocations and replenishment modules also played a key role in Louboutin's decision to select the New York-headquartered enterprise software application provider.

"With this module, we hope to have better visibility over all our inventories, optimize the management of all incoming requests and thus guarantee clients' worldwide delivery deadlines, particularly when there's unexpected spikes in demand for specific items," said Roncatti.

The first stage of Louboutin's deployment of Infor has already been completed in the US, but the full global rollout is expected to take until 2017. That will include the deployment of the core business and trade processes dedicated to the supply chain in its French holding company in September 2016.

Finally, Infor Fashion's Retail module will eventually be implemented to 400 users in the 20 countries where Louboutin is present.

Another luxury brand that uses Infor supply chain management is Ferrari, which deployed Infor's Sales & Operations Planning solution to help the car manufacturer share supply chain information with 200 car deals.