The Body Shop Boosts Growth With SAP

SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that The Body Shop is unifying its worldwide operations on SAP enterprise software, deploying the SAP for Retail industry solution across its headquarters, regional offices, warehouses and more than 2,000 wholly-owned and franchise outlets worldwide. The worldwide agreement for more than 1,000 users in over 50 countries extends the company's SAP footprint to its entire network of stores and distribution centers outside of the United States, where the company is already generating a good return on its investment in SAP's retail-industry software. With the global rollout, the leading skin and body care retailer aims to improve its productivity, customer responsiveness and time to market with new products.

The Body Shop, an SAP customer since 1999, chose SAP's integrated retail enterprise applications to harmonize business processes across its global network, creating a strong yet adaptive foundation for business growth with the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. The worldwide rollout, being implemented with support from IT service provider Diagonal Consulting, is part of the retailer's three-year strategic plan to achieve enterprisewide consistency in forecasting, ordering, allocation and distribution processes. Replacing a number of legacy systems, SAP's suite of core enterprise applications and specialized software for retailers will cover end-to-end business processes from headquarters down to the store level, powering the company's financial processes, warehouse and supply chain management, new product development and point-of-sale (POS) operations.

"As we continue to expand our business internationally, we need a single, enterprisewide IT platform to effectively manage the increasing scale and complexity of our global operations," said Jon Granville, global head of IT, The Body Shop. "We chose SAP for its retail expertise, global reach and solution scope. Our global SAP rollout is not an IT initiative, but a business initiative that will help us improve our key processes that drive competitive advantage at each local outlet. Building on the benefits gained in the U.S., SAP for Retail will help us provide targeted support throughout our sales and distribution network and, ultimately, deliver better service to our customers."

To improve business support for the various operations using the new retail solution, SAP Education trained managers and staff from The Body Shop's project team in areas such as pricing and promotion, procurement and purchasing, and warehouse logistics. With the support of SAP Germany, the rollout kicks off this summer with the POS solution for worldwide retail outlets, where The Body Shop expects to achieve quick results in improving data management. The Body Shop chose SAP specialist Diagonal Consulting to lead the implementation and support its global business transformation for the full deployment of SAP solutions.

Enterprisewide Insight to Power Business Process Efficiency
In creating consistent enterprisewide business processes, one of the company's key aims is to gain better visibility into the vast amounts of information on suppliers, customers and products throughout its global business. At the heart of the integrated solution will be SAP Business Intelligence, a component of SAP NetWeaver, which will enable The Body Shop to gain timely, accurate insight into information across its widespread retail network. All stock movements and cash-flow will thus be tracked at a detailed level, and financial implications of business processes will be posted to mySAP ERP for planning, monitoring, reporting and analysis.

By supporting processes such as warehouse management with insight into product orders and availability, the company will be able to achieve adaptive supply chain operations-for example, adaptive inbound and outbound storage processes to ensure rapid response to spikes in demand while maintaining optimal in-stock levels across the company's global distribution network.

With SAP on the Pulse of the Storefront
SAP POS Data Management, an SAP for Retail application that helps retailers better understand and fulfill consumer needs, will enable swifter processing and analysis of POS data from The Body Shop's retail outlets around the world. The POS application will feed information such as events and promotions, prices and margins, and analytical reason codes for returns to a system at each of the company's regional offices and then centrally to the global headquarters. By providing users at all levels of the global organization with easy access to timely, reliable information on these key business drivers, the application will enable strategic and responsive decision-making to optimize promotional and sales activities for individual geographies or specific product categories.

Faster Time-to-Market for Expanding Product Range
To help reduce the cost and increase the speed of new product development and introduction processes, The Body Shop will deploy mySAP Product Lifecycle Management. Drawing on integrated business intelligence capabilities to align product design to market analysis and customer demand, the solution will enable the company to manage each new product's life cycle from inception and production, through supplier collaboration, to the product launch and trade promotions management.

"Building upon the successes we have already achieved with The Body Shop, we look forward to helping the company evolve its business and extend its leadership in the rapidly changing retail environment," said Jim McMurray, senior vice president, Retail, SAP. "Enhanced with several new, integrated standard applications tailored to the needs of retailers, SAP for Retail provides an end-to-end solution that will help The Body Shop gain real-time visibility, higher efficiency and increased agility across its worldwide operations to grow its global business and better respond to customer demands."

About The Body Shop International
With 2,019 stores in over 50 countries worldwide, the UK-based The Body Shop International is one of the world's most recognized brands. A global retailer of high quality, naturally inspired, toiletries and cosmetics such as Body Butters and Dry Oil Mists, it is also committed to protecting and promoting values such as environmental protection and respect for human rights. It develops trading relationships with communities in need and is opposed to animal testing in the cosmetics industry.

About SAP for Retail
SAP for Retail is an industry solution that combines mySAP Business Suite solutions with a broad set of integrated retail applications to help companies to profitably serve consumer demand across multiple channels. With 376 customers using the SAP for Retail portfolio and more than 1,770 SAP customers in the retail industry worldwide, SAP provides Internet-enabled applications in a fully connected system to help companies integrate sales channels, take advantage of collaboration over the Web, better understand customer preferences, build a business on a solid transactional backbone and bring their businesses to e-marketplaces. Built on the open architecture of the SAP NetWeaver integration and application platform, SAP for Retail allows for integration of business processes for merchandise management and planning, demand forecasting, sophisticated allocation, workforce management, POS data management, RFID, and replenishment. (Additional information at www.sap.com/solutions/industry/retail.)

About SAP
SAP is the world's leading provider of business software solutions. SAP solutions are designed to meet the demands of companies of all sizes-from small and midsize businesses to global enterprises. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver open integration and application platform to reduce complexity and total cost of ownership and empower business change and innovation, mySAP Business Suite solutions are helping enterprises around the world improve customer relationships, enhance partner collaboration and create efficiencies across their supply chains and business operations. The unique core processes of various industries, from aerospace to utilities, are supported by more than 25 industry-specific SAP solution portfolios. Today, more than 22,600 customers in over 120 countries run more than 76,100 installations of SAP software. With subsidiaries in more than 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol "SAP." (Additional information at www.sap.com)