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Clothing Company

Bill of Materials (BOM) Cost Rollup Engine

Performance Architecture Solution

Situation

The legacy cost rollup platform had a long history of how it evolved through acquisitions and mergers. As a homegrown solution, the legacy platform had a lot of challenges inherited over a long period of time:

  • It was originally built for a small scale of BOM records but was later patched again and again to meet the growing demands of the business without following the software product life cycle process
  • Although it was so critical for business operations, it became outdated with no documentation, unsupported third-party software, and very old versions of databases
  • The technical and functional knowledge was extremely limited within the IT department

Impact

Although the client’s business was growing with the addition of new clothing brands, business operations were taking a big hit due to the IT team’s inability to support the new growth with its non-scalable cost rollup platform.

  • The client was forced to take a huge business risk of relying on the high-maintenance legacy system that could not scale to meet the growing demands of the business
  • By not having the daily cost rollup data across the global manufacturing units, the business decisions were made with the previous day’s costing data, which affected the margins
  • The leadership team was frustrated with the failed attempt by the IT team, which invested a lot of time, money, and effort to use one of the leading ERP product lines to transform the legacy platform

Resolution

The client leadership team brought us in for our product engineering capabilities to re-engineer the homegrown legacy platform. We helped the client adopt software engineering principles to deliver the new platform that addressed the challenges with a parallel processing architecture to support scalability, high performance, and new capabilities.

  • The client was delighted to reap the performance benefits of having the cost rollup results available within 2 hours, which enabled its business operations to run effectively
  • The client’s IT team was able to mitigate the risks and challenges from the lack of mainframe talent pool for the outdated legacy platform

Outcomes

For a multinational clothing company, we re-engineered one of its business-critical legacy platforms to calculate BOM cost rollup in 2 hours, an improvement from 23 hours. This re-architected service-oriented solution enabled its business operations to:

  • Provide same-day BOM cost rollup information to all the global manufacturing units before the start of their business day (it used to take 2 days)
  • Run “what if” type scenarios of cost impact analysis of its product lines
  • Depend on the scalable high-performance platform to support its business growth of brand expansion