New Zealand Apparel Leader, Rembrandt, Selects Lawson M3 Suite
Rembrandt is one of the oldest manufacturers and marketers of tailored menswear in the region, selling its products through 400 retail stores throughout New Zealand and Australia.
ST. PAUL, Minn. (May 01, 2007) – Lawson Software (Nasdaq:LWSN) today announced it has signed a contract with leading New Zealand menswear company, Rembrandt Suits. Under the agreement, Rembrandt will implement the Lawson M3 enterprise application suite as part of its strategy to help streamline operational processes and improve business efficiencies. The contract was signed in Lawson’s third quarter of fiscal 2007, which ended Feb. 28, 2007.
Rembrandt is one of the oldest manufacturers and marketers of tailored menswear in the region, selling its products through 400 retail stores throughout New Zealand and Australia. To meet its long-term growth plans, the company recognized the need to establish an integrated business management platform to support the evolving business.
“Today we purchase raw materials from throughout the world, manufacture in New Zealand and Asia, and sell and manage tens of thousands of items and SKUs,” said David Lyford, managing director, Rembrandt Suits. “As such, we have complex sourcing, manufacturing and distribution processes that need to be managed carefully – complexities that will increase as we continue to expand. We had reached the limits of our existing technology system and knew it was time to upgrade to a more sophisticated, integrated platform in order to ensure continuity, reduce inefficiencies and minimize risk to the business.”
Previously, Rembrandt operated on a heavily customized version of an apparel industry software package, built on a proprietary operating system and database environment. It also utilized many other applications to provide functionality that was not available in the basic software package. Increasingly, Rembrandt was devoting excessive staff resources to access and manage data from disparate silos of information, which reduced the company’s ability to effectively respond to changes in the business environment.
“Moving to the Lawson M3 Suite will give us the flexibility and sophisticated functionality we need,” said Lyford. “We chose Lawson because of its significant experience in the fashion industry with strong apparel brands utilizing its applications. We were looking for a partner who would be there to support the evolution of our business operations.”
“With Lawson M3 in place, we expect to see significant improvements and gains across areas such as sales order processing and forecasting, tracking progress through the manufacturing processes, and warehouse and supply chain management,” Lyford continued. “For example, our customers have tight delivery windows, so we need to be able to make sure correct and sufficient raw materials are available at the correct time for manufacturing. The seasonal nature of our business means production schedules are crucial, and the Lawson planning tools will help us fulfill our customers’ requirements on time.”
Rembrandt also pointed to the importance of the integration capabilities of the Lawson M3 suite in supporting its need for transparency of information across the business.
“We must have a shared understanding of business activity – for systems to be able to highlight important information but also allow staff to drill down to detail or historical data on demand. The Lawson M3 Suite will provide us with a consistent, single view of information across all areas of the business,” Lyford added.
“This is a very strategic deal for Lawson in New Zealand,” said Stephen Moore, managing director for Lawson Australia and New Zealand. “It reinforces our reputation as a leading supplier of enterprise management systems to the fashion sector. Rembrandt valued the outstanding evidence of Lawson’s industry expertise and product strength in this industry, with many high profile customer names in the New Zealand and Australian fashion markets – such as Kathmandu, Longbeach, Farah Australia, McLeod Accessories and RM Williams – using the M3 solution. We are pleased to be able to welcome Rembrandt to our well established apparel customer base.”
The first stage of the implementation at Rembrandt is scheduled for completion in late 2007.
Source: Lawson
