Growth at Giant
Apparel Company
GREAT
SUPPLY CHAIN
PARTNERS
Brings Big Change
in Its Forecasting
Since partnering with Logility in the mid-1990s, VF Corp. has moved from in-house manufacturing to a
largely outsourced model and has significantly grown its brand portfolio and distribution channels.
Through it all, the partnership grew stronger.
F Corp. is the world’s largest
apparel company, with more
that 30 leading brands that
include Wrangler, The North
“One of the fascinating things about VF
is that we are one of those companies that
many people have never heard of, but
they know at least some of our brands,”
says Chris Hobson, vice president of busi-
ness systems. “We have tremendous com-
plexity within the company and very
diverse distribution channels,” he says.
“The supply chain is really critical to the
success of VF as we look at the leverage
opportunities across those brands.”
A key factor in the success of VF’s sup-
V
ply chain is its long-term relationship with
Logility and its use of Logility’s Voyager
software solutions. This partnership began
in the mid-1990s and has evolved into a
key strategic relationship, Hobson says.
“When we first selected Logility, VF was
looking to partner with a best-of-breed
application, so we looked at the market
leaders and got down to a short list of two.
Logility came out on top in a head-to-head
functionality test,” he says.
In the early years of the relationship,
VF’s supply chain was much less complex
than it is today, Hobson notes. At that time,
the company did 90 percent of its own manufacturing and most of the products that it
forecast were repetitive, basic products that
were sold year after year, he says.
Since then, VF has outsourced a little
more than half of its production to third-
party suppliers in Latin America and Eastern
Europe and has moved to forecasting many
more seasonal products. Today, the major-
ity of products at some of VF’s brands are
available only for one season, with clearly
defined and extremely short life cycles.
“The number of seasons in a year varies by
brand, but some products are up to eight or
10 seasons,” says Hobson. Although there is
no product demand history for these new,
short-lived items, the profiling tool within
Voyager Demand Planning uses the history
of similar products to forecast sales, he says.
