Setting fashion trends around the world, Hugo Boss has been a global market leader in designer fashion since the 1970s. Headquartered in Germany, the Hugo Boss Group has more than 1,000 stores worldwide and in excess of 5,700 point of sales venues with a range of partners. The Group covers all major fashion segments for men and women, and has additional product groups that complement individual collections, such as shoes and accessories, fragrances, eyewear and watches.

As Europe’s largest fashion producer, Hugo Boss has production facilities in Germany, America, Switzerland and Turkey. It has three factories in Izmir, Turkey, which employ 2,500 staff and produce around 13,000 suits and 35,000 shirts a week.

Production processes at the company’s factories in Turkey are underpinned by a number of core applications, which must be continuously available to prevent delays in delivering seasonal collections to retailers.

To ensure a smooth and timely delivery of its goods to retailers in Turkey, Hugo Boss has a globally networked IT infrastructure and uses automated cutting-edge warehousing and materials handling systems. This enables the company to predefine delivery dates and ensure collections are distributed on time.

With all its fashion production and distribution systems reliant on IT, any system downtime can cause major delays to Hugo Boss’ supply chain, which can impact both profitability and reputation if there is prolonged disruption.

Following a hardware failure at one of its Turkish sites that resulted in a two-hour systems outage, Hugo Boss decided to enhance its business continuity capabilities. “Luckily the downtime in this particular instant only impacted non-critical systems, but it served as a wake-up call,” comments Bahcivan. “We recognised that if our core business systems were impacted by such an incident, we could suffer significant losses in productivity.”

To minimize downtime and optimize the availability of its IT infrastructure, Hugo Boss turned to IT partner Egebimtes to help implement a data replication strategy. “Data availability is critical both to our factories and administrative operations: product planning, inventory tracking, HR, finance, Web site content and staff training are all reliant on timely access to information,” comments Bahcivan.

In particular, Hugo Boss is dependent on the availability of its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and intranet, which provides information on new orders and instructions about how to create the latest fashion designs.

After researching a number of data replication options, Hugo Boss and Egebimtes selected a CA Recovery Management solution. “CA XOsoft™ WANSync™ offers fast and reliable data replication with minimal need for manual intervention. With increasing pressure on the IT team to achieve more for less, this was a very important factor in the decision process,” comments Bahcivan.

In total, 1.5 terabytes of data is replicated from Hugo Boss’ database, ERP, file and intranet servers using the CA solution. “In the event of a hardware failure, we can now recover our core systems in just 30 minutes, compared to a full day prior to the implementation of CA XOsoft WANSync,” adds Bahcivan. Hugo Boss also uses the solution’s Enterprise Rewinder function, as Bahcivan explains, “Enterprise Rewinder helps to protect against data corruption. If a corruption event happens we can rewind our systems to just seconds before the occurrence to ensure we don’t lose any data.”

By reducing its recovery time by nearly 95 per cent, Hugo Boss is able to ensure the availability of production systems at its Izmir factories. “Hugo Boss has extremely high internal standards,” comments Bahcivan. “Through CA XOsoft WANSync we are able to easily demonstrate our business continuity credentials to inspectors at internal audits, and prove we are compliant with company standards.”

“Thanks to the CA Recovery Management solution, we are able to ensure the continuity of our critical production and administrative systems. This enables us to focus on maintaining the quality of our garments and the efficiency of our supply chain, which in the fast-paced fashion world, is critical to competitive advantage,” comments Bahcivan.