Erp Review - Microsoft Vs. Sap

Enterprise Tools Review Paper

Clothing Unlimited, Inc.

SAP vs. Microsoft

December 3, 2007

Clothing Unlimited, Inc. is a worldwide distribution and manufacturing company for high-end consumer clothing. Headquartered in Dallas Texas, Clothing Unlimited Inc. has distribution centers and manufacturing locations around the world, UK, France, South Africa, Brazil, North America, China, Japan, and Taiwan. With global revenue of just over one billion dollars and 5,500 employ-ees, Clothing Unlimited, Inc. focuses on modern high-end clothing from around the world. Some of their largest customers include Nordstrom, high end retailers of imported clothes, Sachs 5th Ave-nue, Nike Apparel, Guess, etc. Due to the cut throat nature of import/export and contract manufac-turing industry, Clothing Unlimited, Inc. focuses its' efforts on a streamlined distribution system, inventory management program, just in time delivery, and cost control. Their home grown legacy system is quickly becoming out dated and no longer proves to be competitive in the information and integration age.

This research focused on the evaluation of two leading end to end business solutions, both providing operational, manufacturing, finance, administration, supply chain, inventory management, sales, and order management capabilities. The end goal is to integrate end to end processes pro-viding a clear, on demand, picture of product availability, future needs, WIP, while still providing scalability. Driving this effort is the continued pressure of inventory management, cost of owner-ship, shrinking lead-times, and the increasing technically competent competition.

Directive from the CEO and board of directors is to reduce inventory costs, decrease sales cycle time, and to derive value from the existing corporate information technology infrastructure. Total cost of ownership should be considered,