The PVH is constantly evolving, and E/D/E as an association partner helps its members to stay ahead of the game. The range of services is diverse and covers all aspects of the business
Reliable and efficient in the core business
The core business relating to goods and the supply of goods to PVH remains the basis for all other E/D/E services. The importance of central warehouse functionality continues to grow. It demands a high level of reliability in logistics. At the same time, the increasing fragmentation of consignments requires new solutions. Currently and in the coming year 2022, the availability of goods is important for every retailer. E/D/E expanded its stocks in order to be able to act as effectively as possible even in times of disrupted supply chains. At the same time, one of the most modern packaging machines has increased the efficiency of logistics since this year.
Pragmatic approach in emergencies: E/D/E made goods available at short notice during the disaster in summer 2021 with a range of products to help in the event of flooding. All processes have been simplified – right down to personal collection by helpers.
Successful further development of financial services
In 2021, the rating agency GBB-Rating awarded ETRIS BANK a credit rating of “A+ stable” for its “sustainable, crisis-tested business model”. The overall package of the E/D/E subsidiary founded ten years ago is successful on the market, and PVH is happy to accept it. ETRIS BANK’s centralized settlement has also met with great interest in the third-party market business.
This success justifies the idea of founding a bank for PVH. Financial services remain an important success factor in the successful development and expansion of a company. In addition to traditional full-service banking services, such as investment financing and payment transactions, factoring is also part of the
portfolio and is meeting with high demand in PVH. Factoring can be managed flexibly via an online portal and gives the customer complete control.
Efficient processes for PVH
Digitalization is one of E/D/E’s most important investment sectors, as trade will rely significantly more on IT in the future, not less. To ensure that members can enjoy the best digital service on the market, E/D/E is constantly developing its offering for the benefit of its members. This also includes collaborations with partners, such as the latest addition to the E/D/E ecosystem, the product information management system nextPIM (see page 36). In the ERP sector, E/D/E has focused on the needs of many members: The new ERPcloud360, for example, integrates into existing systems and, as a cloud solution, can be scaled as required and is not dependent on a local data center (see page 34/35). The new E/D/E member management system helps you to choose the right services from the wide range on offer. This team of specialists is close to the market and supports members in the process.
PVH FUTURE LAB: Technologies with added value
Just over two and a half years after it was founded, PVH FU-TURE LAB has developed from an innovation laboratory into an established digital company – by retailers for retailers of PVH. With the flixxstore, the PVH FUTURE LAB offers a powerful and versatile platform that makes future technologies relating to digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI) easily accessible to the production connection trade. This includes the newly developed sellflixx Link Tracker, for example. The central tracking system allows evaluations of access figures for each type of link – for success controls that can be used directly throughout the company. sellflixx Customer Protection also uses artificial intelligence to identify and prevent impending customer churn at an early stage. At the same time, Rapid3D is constantly being further developed in the area of the 3D printing platform. The new platform version 3.0 has been available since August 2021 with many new functions on the user and admin side.
Proximity through presence: Business NETZWERK and E/D/E AKADEMIE
In 2021, E/D/E continued to provide its partners with timely and frequent resources that have helped entrepreneurs in the PVH to manage their business on a good information basis in uncertain times, and has met with a positive response, as evidenced by the high number of participants. This includes exchanging experiences in the Business NETZWERK groups – in some cases also in face-to-face events to generate proximity. However, the E/D/E AKADEMIE ‘s digital training courses and colleges were also able to take place in person again towards the end of the year. E/D/E aims to strike an intelligent balance between face-to-face and digital meetings. Business trips should also take place in this way in future – especially if their added value outweighs the digital meeting.
Added value thanks to modern technology: the E/D/E Studio
If you want to generate added sales and strategic value, you need to communicate information to a large group of people. To this end, E/D/E set up its own studio in the Wuppertal headquarters with professional image and sound technology. The Verbund Group went on air from there almost 50 times in recordings and live streams. With a wide variety of formats – including conferences of all kinds, product
and catalog training courses in seven European languages or the digital industry update – many thousands of PVH specialists and managers were reached in this way.
Recognizing market developments, exploiting opportunities
With digitalization as a key driver, new challenges but also opportunities for PVH are arising in ever faster cycles. E/D/E sees identifying and classifying these and aligning itself to them together with the trade as the central task of a high-performance, progressive buying group. Two current examples from 2021 are the development of new business models for the important future topic of BIM (Building Information Modeling) and the market launch of the ETT BASIC (see p. 30). The latter is a vending machine specially designed for the skilled trades, with which future-oriented retail companies can now also score points with end customers in the skilled trades with intelligent solutions for the efficient supply of goods. Concrete value-added services such as these therefore offer PVH new sales opportunities in a world in which customer requirements are changing dramatically.
