About the client
The client is a fashion retail group operating a large network of stores in a B2B2C model, combining sourcing, distribution, and sales to the end consumer. Its product range spans a wide set of non-food categories, and its organizational structure is deep and distributed across regions.
At this breadth, sourcing quality depends on coordination. Category managers, buyers, and suppliers each shape the assortment, and without a shared system, those decisions are difficult to compare or govern.
Challenge
Before the project, procurement ran entirely by hand. There was no consistent method for evaluating suppliers or goods, which made it hard to identify the strongest offers. Across a wide, fast-moving non-food assortment, buying happened without common rules, and both efficiency and transparency suffered.
This led to several issues:
- Manual procurement with no supporting system for requests, tendering, or supplier interaction
- No structured method for scoring suppliers or product samples, weakening offer selection
- Fragmented buying across a broad non-food assortment, with limited comparability between decisions
- Low transparency into how and why specific purchasing choices were made
- High manual effort in calculating and comparing the true cost of competing offers
Key project objectives included:
- Consolidate sourcing into a single, structured procurement environment
- Standardize tendering and supplier selection across categories
- Introduce objective scoring of suppliers and product samples
- Move procurement documentation into a traceable digital format
- Reduce the manual effort behind cost comparison and decision-making
“We went from buying that depended on individual judgement to one shared logic the whole group can follow. With more than 100 users on a single platform, our category decisions are easier to compare and far easier to defend.”
— Senior Procurement Manager, Fashion Retail Group
Solution
The objective was to give a complex, multi-region retail organization one structured environment for sourcing. Over roughly one year, from concept through full rollout, APSentra modeled the group’s category and approval structure as a digital twin of how the business actually buys, then automated the tendering and selection logic on top of it.
A distinctive part of the design is a two-stage tendering model built around the relationship between internal and external demand. First, an internal competition selects the winning buyer among category managers. That buyer then runs the external tender with suppliers. The result is internal accountability for category strategy and competitive pressure on the supply side, within one governed process.
Key capabilities delivered:
- Request module — structured collection of category needs, assortment-matrix planning, and procurement plan formation, routed for approval across the organization.
- Tender module — internal bidding among category managers followed by external supplier tenders, with sample evaluation, tender publication, participant invitation, and documented decision-making.
- Automated landed-cost calculation — a configured formula that compares offers on adjusted cost, factoring price, delivery terms, and other parameters, removing hours of manual calculation per decision.
- ERP integration — synchronization with the client’s accounting and operational ERP system, so procurement data and records stay consistent across platforms.
Results
A consolidated procurement system
Objective supplier and sample evaluation
Faster, cleaner cost comparison
Adoption across the group
A platform built to scale
Business impact
Procurement at the group moved from a manual, judgement-driven activity into a governed, comparable, and digitally documented function. Category decisions now follow one logic across regions, which makes them easier to compare, easier to justify, and less dependent on any single person’s knowledge. The implementation became a defining step in the group’s wider digital transformation of sourcing.
