Footwear Industry Footwear Industry - empirica

Footwear
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are software systems that help to
integrate and cover all major business activities within a company, including product
planning, parts purchasing, inventory management, order tracking, human resources,
projects management, and finance. Ideally, they link business processes electronically
across different business functions and thus help to improve efficiency in operating those
processes. In addition, ERP systems can play an important role for supporting the
connectivity between enterprises. For manufacturing companies, ERP systems are an
important "hub" for much of their e-business activities with other companies.
The deployment of ERP systems in
the footwear industry is considerably
lower than in other manufacturing
industries. Particularly among the
medium-sized and large footwear
companies, the installed base is low.
This could hamper advanced forms
of B2B integration, for example for
processing orders, delivery notes and
invoices.
This finding raises some question
marks, as it is not intuitively clear why
ERP should be less relevant for footwear
companies than for other manufacturing
firms.
Exhibit 3-14: Companies with an ERP system
Food & bev.
Footwear
Pulp & paper
ICT manufact.
Cons. electr.
Shipbuilding
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
10
7
16
16
12
23
32
30
17
39
45
61
Base (100%): Companies using computers.
N (for sector, EU-10) = 769.
Questionnaire reference: D1d
% of empl.
% of firms
Source: e-Business W@tch (Survey 2006)
In fact, case studies conducted for this report indicate that ERP applications are used by
companies and bring relevant advantages (see case studies about Atomic and Shoe-D-
Vision in Sections 4.1 and 4.2, respectively). Other companies, however, highlighted that
standard solutions may be too expensive and not tailored to the company’s specific
needs (see case study on Alpina, in Section 4.2), or that the legacy system does not
allow for the integration of standard solutions and imposes the adoption of ad hoc ones
(see the Moreschi case study in Section 4.2).
In the e-Business Survey (2006), e-Business W@tch asked those companies that do not
use an ERP system whether they used any special accounting software (other than just
spreadsheet calculation programmes, such as MS Excel). In smaller companies,
accounting software typically substitutes the functionality of ERP software in larger firms,
although on a much simpler level and with a lower potential for automating order-related
document flows. Here, in contrast to the findings for ERP, the picture for the footwear
industry is very similar to the one for the other sectors studied this year by the e-Business
W@tch: except for micro enterprises, the majority of firms in footwear -as in all other
studied sectors- reported using some type of accounting software – about 60% of firms
representing about 70% of employment (see Exhibit 3-13). Focusing on SMEs in the
footwear industry, this leaves about 5-8% of SMEs with neither an ERP system nor
accounting software. One could assume that it would be difficult for these companies to
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