Zara Case Report

| |Zara: IT for Fast Fashion | |Case report | | | |

| |6/19/2013 | |

Executive summary

To address the current issues of upgrading/not upgrading of the Point of terminal (POS) in the ZARA’s stores all over the world, I will propose in the upcoming company budget to allocate €14 million for the upgrade of current obsolete operating system that we use. A Pilot project will be implemented in one of Zara’s store in Spain to discover any flaws or ideas. It will be a long process to implement hence; we will be implementing this into our stores gradually all over the world.

The decision is of strategic importance as far as IT is concerned, we just cannot afford if one day we get to know our POS terminals are not compatible with DOS anymore.

Xan Salgado

Head of IT, Zara

Issue identification

The point of sale (POS) terminals used by ZARA stores worldwide are getting far behind current technology. We are the sole customer of our hardware vendor that is still using DOS. If vendor for our POS terminals decides to make the machine obsolete or change the machines in some way that can’t support DOS then we are in big trouble. DOS is no longer supported by Microsoft since 2003, also using of DOS limits Zara’s capabilities and prevents us from adding functionality to our POS terminals. Store managers have been asking to add more functionality (ways to look up inventory in their stores and other stores) and adding networking capability. Personal digital assistants (PDA) used during ordering process is not efficient, use of several PDA’s by several people in the same store makes effort redundant and more prone to errors. Also, working with digital order form sent to store managers from headquarter (La Coruna) which includes images of newly available items and replenishment items is time consuming due to small screen size and connectivity.

Lack of sharing information between POS terminals in the store, lack of sharing information...