As it aspires to be the “leading tech-driven fashion platform,” Germany-based luxury label Hugo Boss has been undergoing a digital transformation that includes advancing its planning processes.
Supporting this technology-focused strategy, the company is shifting from fragmented, manual planning activities to unified, artificial intelligence-powered systems that it sees enabling better use of data for decision-making across the supply chain. Through this work, the company expects to be able to respond to demand changes quicker, improve sourcing decisions and achieve better inventory alignment for greater availability, reduced markdowns and boosted margins.
During a panel at o9’s Aim10x Digital virtual event, Ralf Kromer, vice president business planning and analysis at Hugo Boss, explained the motivation behind this transformation. “Currently, we are living in a very volatile market, and we need data, and we need a decision-finding process which everybody can trust, everybody can build on,” he said, adding that the company is seeking to make planning more accurate and quicker by using AI and algorithms.
Hugo Boss sought a “real-time integrated” technology solution, which it found in o9’s Digital Brain, a platform that unifies analytics, planning and decision-making. “It’s one technology stack, end-to-end and across the entire modules. From an IT point of view, a simple implementation in terms of integration—I just have to integrate to o9, not between o9,” said Eduard Spitz, senior vice president global IT at Hugo Boss. He added that this will make it easier to add on in the future, such as incorporating agentic AI—a form of artificial intelligence that can act more autonomously to achieve goals or solve problems.
In the first half year of this project, Hugo Boss has been working to bring its demand, product and supply data streams onto a single platform, and O9’s planning suite is being integrated with Hugo Boss’ data management platform Azure Data Lake. Today, over 100 people across multiple functions of the business are actively involved in this project. In addition to having spokespeople overseeing individual business units, Hugo Boss has an analyst that looks at the end-to-end ecosystem to ensure that there aren’t silos. In another cross-department push, it is establishing a center of excellence that will unite business and IT to facilitate adoption of these tools.
As with any transformation, change management is a key part of the process. Ivica Maric, executive vice president business operations at Hugo Boss, noted that getting stakeholders on the same page should begin with discussing the value it will bring to the business. “Communicate it constantly,” he said. “It’s not done with a launch event and just communicating it once. You have to bring that message across over and over again, and you really need to show also progress in delivering value to the business with what you’re doing.”
Digitalization is part of Hugo Boss’ “Claim 5” strategy, introduced in 2021 with the aim of doubling its business to 4 billion euros by 2025 by boosting its brands, focusing on product, leading in digital, accelerating omnichannel and setting itself up for growth. Through these efforts, the company already surpassed this financial target in 2024, with a record 4.3 billion euros in sales.
“By reducing manual workload, teams will be able to focus on the high-impact decisions that drive business growth,” said Santiago Poveda, vice president of retail, distribution and apparel at o9.
As Poveda highlighted in a presentation during the virtual event, the apparel industry is facing a more complex planning landscape with factors like faster trend cycles and economic uncertainty making it challenging to predict consumer behavior based on historical data. At the same time, companies need to allocate merchandise to more fulfillment channels than before. There is also more complexity in planning product offerings to prevent inventory from being marked down or becoming waste. He pointed to the value of automation—including autonomous decision-making—and analytics in navigating escalating consumer demands.
Understanding demand is one thing, but companies also must be able to execute on it, which Poveda explained is challenging amid heightened supply chain risks like geopolitical turmoil and natural disasters. Responding to demand effectively also requires companies to collaborate with suppliers and monitor potential risks, which digital tools can facilitate. He has seen companies increasingly opt to connect their environmental, social and governance (ESG) and supply chain management processes on a single platform to enable them to simultaneously plan for and balance sustainability and efficiency considerations.
O9’s technology allows companies to play out scenarios to predict what effect different decisions would have for their business. “The future of planning is to no longer look at these challenges in isolation,” said Poveda. “Planning decisions are tightly interconnected, and the potential value unlock through an end-to-end, next-gen integrated business planning that breaks down the silos is massive.”
