Zara Harvard Business Review

Title: Zara: IT for Fast Fashion

(Case Study from Harvard Business School)

Introduction:

This case study focuses on Zara’s IT strategy in early 2000s. Zara’s headquarter was based in La Coruna, a town in northern Spain.

Zara was growing significantly within Europe as well as outside Europe to cater with the global demand of good designed fast fashion.

Zara’s POS system (Point-of-Sale) was DOS based, which was very stable and was not upgraded for more than a decade. DOS was not supported by Microsoft anymore in 2003. Zara did not have a dedicated structure of IT team for faster and decentralized decision making.

Zara’s growth from mid 1990s to early 2000s

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問①　Salgado氏にPOSのアップグレードに関してどのようなアドバイスをあなたならするか？

Looking at the facts mentioned in this case and faced by Zara in early 2000s, it is recommended to upgrade the POS (Point-of-Sale) system for handling the increasing demands of the business and also to connect several departments inside the company for efficient and faster processes. Few of the main reasons for this recommendation are explained below:

POS System Running on Obsolete OS:

Zara was using a POS system across their retail chain stores which were built on DOS operating system manufactured by Microsoft. Microsoft stopped supporting DOS operating system (OS) for any system issues in its core a few years ago. Therefore Zara’s POS system was running on a risk that any trouble in the core OS can stop the whole operation in its retails stores.

Similarly the hardware vendor of the POS machines can stop making DOS compatible machines anytime, which is also a risk factor for Zara which is in a global growth phase.

With these uncertainties, not upgrading current POS system would put Zara into a risk where growth plan of Zara can be impacted. Therefore, it is advisable to replace/upgrade the current POS system to reduce the above mentioned risk.

Leveraging the Opportunity:

Zara’s current POS...