How Nike Built a Robust Business Case
Knight, not normally known for self-control, has shown extraordinary patience with Nike's supply chain project. And he's needed it. "Once we got into this, we quickly realized that what we originally thought was going to be a two-to-three-year effort would be more like five to seven," says Wolfram.
It's been six years now and counting, with the final stage of the project due to be finished sometime in 2006 at a total cost that has gone from a projected $US400 million to $US500 million, according to Wolfram.
The theme of Nike's sneaker supply chain is centralization. All product design, factory contracting and delivery is planned and coordinated from Beaverton, Oregon. The supply chain is built around a six-month order cycle, called the "Futures" program, that was developed in 1975 in response to the then-chaotic market for running shoes. In those days, the Far East sneaker supply chain was in its infancy, deliveries were spotty, inflation was high, and runners bought whatever shoes they could find regardless of brand. Nike won that market by guaranteeing delivery and an inflation-proof discount in return for getting its orders six months in advance. Retailers went along happily because runners didn't much care about style or looks - they wanted technically advanced shoes that fitted and were in steady supply. Retailers knew their Nike shoes would sell no matter how far in advance they ordered them.
But as Nike became increasingly global, its supply chain began to fragment. By 1998, Nike had 27 order management systems around the globe, all highly customized and poorly linked to Beaverton. To gain control over its nine-month manufacturing cycle, Nike decided that it needed systems as centralized as its planning processes. ERP software, specifically SAP's R/3 software, would be the bedrock of Nike's strategy, with i2 supply, demand and collaboration planner software applications and Siebel's CRM software also knitted into the overall system using middleware from STC (now SeeBeyond).
Nike's patience was a virtue here too. It skipped AFS (Apparel and Footwear Solution), the initial version of SAP's R/3 software developed specifically for the apparel and footwear industry. Archrival Reebok, which partnered with VF (makers of Wrangler Jeans and Vanity Fair bras, among other things) on the beta effort to develop AFS beginning in 1996, struggled for years to implement the buggy, unstable AFS software. (Reebok declined to be interviewed for this story.) And although Nike purchased AFS in 1998, it didn't attempt to install it until SAP began working on the second, more stable version of the software. "Most of the early adopters were busy installing AFS in 1999," says Steele with a satisfied smile. "That's when we began spending a lot of time with SAP, sending our people over to Germany to tell them what we'd like to see in the second version."
Why I2 Went Wrong
Unfortunately, Nike didn't apply that same patience to the implementation of the first part of its supply chain strategy: i2's demand and supply planner software applications. Rather than wait to deploy i2 as part of its SAP ERP project, Nike decided to install i2 beginning in 1999, while it was still using its legacy systems.
According to court documents filed by Nike and i2 shareholders in class-action suits, little went right before June 2000. i2's predictive demand application and its supply chain planner (which maps out the manufacturing of specific products) used different business rules and stored data in different formats, making it difficult to integrate the two applications. The i2 software needed to be so heavily customized to operate with Nike's legacy systems that it took as much as a minute for a single entry to be recorded by the software. And, overwhelmed by the tens of millions of product numbers Nike used, the system frequently crashed.
But these problems would have remained only glitches had they not spilled over into factory orders. The system ignored some orders and duplicated others. The demand planner also deleted ordering data six to eight weeks after it was entered, making it impossible for planners to recall what they had asked each factory to produce. Soon, way too many orders for Air Garnetts were going over the wires to Asian factories while calls for Air Jordans were lost or deleted.
When the problems were discovered, Nike had to develop workarounds. Data from i2's demand predictor had to be downloaded and manually reloaded into the supply chain planner by occupying programmers, quality assurance personnel and businesspeople whenever the applications were required to share data - which was as often as weekly. Consultants were brought in to build databases to bypass portions of the i2 applications, and custom bridges were constructed to enable the i2 demand and supply planner applications to share.
Nike claims the kinks were ironed out by November 2000, but the damage was done, affecting sales and inventory deep into Nike's next quarter. When the company's SAP system arrived, short- and medium-range planning moved out of i2 altogether and into SAP. Nike says the $US10 million i2 system was a small part of the $US500 million overall project cost, although some observers assert that the i2 cost was higher.
Why did things go so wrong? Wolfram says Nike lulled itself into a false sense of security about the i2 installation because, by comparison with the SAP plan, it was a much smaller project. (Nike has about 200 planners who use the demand and supply planning systems.) "This felt like something we could do a little easier since it wasn't changing everything else [in the business]," he says. "But it turned out it was very complicated."
"Could we have taken more time with the rollout?" asks Steele. "Probably. Could we have done a better job with software quality? Sure. Could the planners have been better prepared to use the system before it went live? You can never train enough."
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