Function Forward

Aurora Fashions may not yet be a fully recognizable name in the United States, but watch out: The U.K.-based retailer trades in 45 countries, and a variety of solutions are bringing consistency and unification to the back-end operations of a company with a reputation for unswerving brand integrity.

Aurora has four core brands — Karen Millen, Coast, Warehouse and Oasis — mostly aimed at the higher end of the apparel market. The brands run the gamut from occasion wear for the sophisticate to clubbing clothes for the twenty-something urban woman. While the bulk of the company’s business is in the U.K., Aurora has a dozen Karen Millen stores in the United States with two more set to open, and the company currently offers its Coast brand in six Bloomingdale’s locations.

Powering the enterprise are Epicor solutions, which are used in some 1,300 of the company’s stores worldwide. In U.S. e-commerce, the brands run on a system by BT Expedite, a reseller of Epicor products. No wonder, then, that John Bovill, Aurora’s group IT director, says his company has “grown up with” Epicor, the two organizations complementing and spurring each other on along the way. Most recently, Aurora worked with Epicor to tackle store systems and global sourcing.

Aurora has expanded through acquisition and organic growth, and intends to continue to “challenge the norm,” Bovill says. To do so, “you need partners who can react to that and work with you on it. … You have to work with your suppliers, not against your suppliers. It has to be a two-way communication. What we have with Epicor is that when we have those downsides, there is a mutual respect to get around those issues. It’s about relationship. And beneath all of that, Epicor has a good technical competence based on proven technical platforms.”

Focused global expansion
Diane Neaven, director of product development, enterprise for Epicor, personally sees Aurora as an “exciting” retailer. “When I lived in the U.K., I really admired the brand,” she says. “It was always colorful, really nice, fashionable. But finding out they were a customer, I felt that connection.”

Of additional interest, she says, is the way the company has approached global expansion. Quite a few of Epicor’s customers are multi-national, but Aurora has managed to maintain “a tremendously focused, very efficient, tight ship” throughout. That kind of success, Neaven believes, has much to do with a unification of business processes and previously disparate systems: Flexibility, fluidity and integration are essential.

In retailing, she says, “you’ve got the design group, the buyers and the planners. The tendency has been for them all to work on different systems.” There is, obviously, software for designers, but “the whole sourcing component that brings together the buyer’s vision as well as the plan for the overall collection and direction of the retailer typically has not been under one umbrella.

“Retailers may not be aware that there are software applications designed to address a broad range of business processes such as those that Epicor’s sourcing and PLM cover,” Neaven says.

When Epicor first partners with a retailer, she says, “we almost never go in and replace another system. When people bring sourcing on board, what they’re doing is supplying software to people who may be using spreadsheets or legacy systems or several different products. We really unify them.”