Microsoft Commerce Case Study

Microsoft Product

Siemens

Microsoft Commerce Case Study

Nautica Apparel, Inc. is communicating much more efficiently with worldwide licensees thanks to a new intranet/extranet solution powered by Microsoft® BackOffice® family products. Microsoft solution provider Hurricane Technology Partners helped Nautica design an eExtranet solution that streamlines communications between Nautica and its business partners, gives all parties 24-hour access to design information, contracts, and sales data, and helps Nautica bring additional licensees online.

In the highly competitive fashion industry, success is determined by design originality. Nautica Apparel, Inc., a New York City-based sportswear, accessory, and home furnishing designer, has devised an ingenious extranet (an intranet accessible by outside business partners) for sharing its designs with a growing base of licensees. The solution links Nautica more tightly with its licensees all over the world, streamlining communication and making time-critical design changes instantly accessible to everyone. Moreover, the Microsoft® BackOffice® family technology-based solution requires minimal training for employees, who are already familiar with the Microsoft Windows® operating system and Microsoft Windows® -based desktop products.

Too Much Process

Nautica Apparel hired Microsoft partner, Hurricane Technology Partners to help it build an intranet to facilitate one of its core business processes: managing licensees. “As we grow our licensee base, it becomes more critical that we have a process for effectively and economically communicating with our partners,” says Doug Colley, director of retail development for Nautica Licensing.

Hurricane analyzed Nautica’s workflow and saw that the company was affected by the high cost of traditional communications, rekeying of data and related errors, and a tedious contract management process. For every design Nautica produces, there's a sheaf of information that must be communicated to licensees: color art boards, thematic background, fabric and accessory specifications, coordinating pieces, pattern information, packaging specifications, and on and on. Nautica was dispatching all this information through phone calls, memos, faxes, and overnight mail. Over the course of bringing a design to market, numerous changes are always made, necessitating enormous effort (and expense) to keep all players up -to -date and in the loop. On the sales side, licensees would mail quarterly sales reports to Nautica in a variety of formats. Nautica employees would then rekey this information into a Microsoft Access database in an effort to bring some consistency to a time-consuming process.

“Besides reducing overnight delivery costs, our design, licensing, and financial staffs were spending significant time copying, Fed-Exing, and following up on details,” says Colley.

“Our licensees are thrilled with this extranet. They, as well as everyone at Nautica, have instant access to all the information they need to be more productive. And it’s always up -to -date.”

Doug Colley

Director of Retail Development for Nautica Licensing

The Intranet Keeps Track of Everything

Hurricane created an intranet/extranet using Microsoft BackOffice family products, along with Microsoft Office 97 , to streamline Nautica’s workflow and share information. Now, authorized Nautica employees and worldwide licensees view the same information and any changes in real time.

Instead of faxing, mailing, and phoning critical design details, the design staff enters everything into a Microsoft SQLServer™ database. Licensees take this detailed information and immediately execute the design directions. When Nautica makes a change, Microsoft Exchange Server issues an e-mail trigger to the appropriate person in the licensee company to let them know of the change.

For reporting sales back to Nautica, licensees access the extranet and enter their sales figures and stock keeping units (SKUs) directly into their browser, populating Nautica's database on the other end.

“Our licensees are thrilled with this extranet,” Colley says. “They, as well as everyone at Nautica, have instant access to all the information they need to be more productive. And it’s always up -to -date.” Users can download design information from the SQLServer database into a Microsoft Access database, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, or a Microsoft Word document for further work at their PCs.

An Integrated Solution That's Easy to Manage

Hurricane built Nautica’s intranet/extranet solution on Microsoft BackOffice, an integrated family of products that simplifies server management. Nautica is currently running the licensing extranet on two servers, one devoted to handling requests from Nautica employees and the other to serving licensees. Both run the same BackOffice applications and the same SQLServer database, which is replicated nightly from one machine to the other. Approximately 75 PCs at Nautica and another 100 at licensees around the world access Nautica's Hurricane developed extranet.

Jordan Harris, president and CEO of Hurricane Technology Partners, says the economy and smooth integration of the BackOffice family products made their job a lot easier. “The Microsoft [platform] strategy makes it much easier and more economical to do this kind of development and to do it quickly,” he says. “A tightly integrated solution gives our clients’ ISinformation systems department the assurance that this is not a patchwork solution. It’s easy to build, service, and manage.”

Microsoft SQLServer contains Nautica's database of design and licensee information and provides fast responses to 200-plus concurrent users. “We wanted a good WindowsNT®® [operating system]-based database, and SQLServer was the logical choice,” says Harris. “SQLServer is very widely known and used, which gives our clients a high comfort factor. We also wanted to build on users’ familiarity with Windows and Office 97. SQLServer allows them to easily transfer information over to Word or Excel.”

Microsoft Exchange Server is Nautica’s messaging system, integrating tightly with WindowsNT Server and SQLServer to provide automatic e-mail triggers when anyone updates the database, when sales information is due, and for other critical process points. A common messaging systems also facilitates better communication and easier collaboration within Nautica and between Nautica and its outside business partners.

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada information Centre at (800) 563-9048. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web,
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For more information contact: ,or (212) 727-1767

© 1998 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, BackOffice, Visual Basic, Windows, and WindowsNT are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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To secure Nautica’s extranet, Hurricane augments WindowsNT Server’s built-in server-side security measures with Microsoft Certificate Server’s client-side security features. Certificate Server authenticates not only individual users but also individual PCs before granting access privileges. This helps prevent anyone, even an employee, from accessing Nautica’s extranet outside the company, say, from a home computer.

Hurricane developers used Microsoft’s Visual InterDev™ Web development tool and Active Server Pages extensively in building the Nautica site. Active Server Pages (ASP’s), a feature of Windows NT Server's built-in Web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), enable you to develop powerful web-based applications with minimal effort. Hurricane's Harris calls ASP’s a “full-blown programming language, like a server-side implementation of Microsoft Visual Basic® Script.” Plus, Active Server Pages comes with WindowsNT, so Hurricane didn’t have to acquire any additional development tools. As for reliability of the WindowsNT Server operating system, Harris says Nautica hasn’t had a minute of downtime in months.

The real competitive benefit of this system is the fact that everyone has instant access to the same body of information, anytime they need it—in a format that’s friendly and intuitive. “This intranet puts us in a position to manage our business more effectively and takes us to the next stage of managing our growth,” Colley concludes.

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