With a turnover of $1.6 billion (USD), Triumph International is one of the world's leading manufacturers of lingerie, nightwear, homewear and swimwear. 32,000 employees in more than 38 countries are making sure that all 211 million pieces produced annually meet the quality standards of this manufacturing icon. What began as a classic corsetry company in 1886 in Swabia is today one of Germany’s strongest brand names, with products in almost every woman's closet. Their SLOGGI brand is number one in briefs in Europe.

In the early seventies Triumph International had already achieved a rather advanced level of automation within the company. The order-processing department could handle 20,000 order lines per day, which were supported by a computerised warehouse, on-line production control, MRP and a highly advanced financial information system. Although these solutions were "state-of-the-art" in those days, they were all functionally oriented, only focusing on one specific area or task. Despite all investments in these solutions, management were facing the following challenges:

• Stagnant markets and increasing costs required better service level
• Flexibility towards customers
• Shorter delivery times
• The need to tie up less capital in stocks
• A reduction of losses due to "wrong" stocks.

"What we have in the warehouse is not what the customers want, and what the customers want we don't have in the warehouse," was a common complaint from the sales force.

Meeting these demands required strong managerial co-ordination and a breakaway from the traditional functional thinking. In fact it was a cry for Supply Chain Management before the word was invented. Since Triumph was working to the consumer market very closely and mainly produced "anonymously", it was obvious this could only be achieved by improving the forecast of future demand. But how to cope with the mix in the assortment?

At Triumph, multi-seasonal products are offered in two-dimensional size ranges of which 80% is sold from stock and single-season high fashion products are sold on pre-order basis. None of the available forecasting tools was able to handle this complexity. Triumph took the decision to develop their own system that would cover these requirements.
The following points were designated to be key factors for success:

1. More accurate planning by improving the forecast
2. Develop an "Early Warning System" that gives us a signal so we can react in time to changes in market demand
3. Create a system that constantly monitors your market from different angles: geographically; from a product point of view and from the customers point of view
4. Improve the process of business planning and controlling; this means the process of annual budgeting and the monitoring of the budgets.
5. Improve customer service by 24 hour deliveries
   

These were the demands to be met by the future system. In five years time a team of people from Triumph International and IBM developed the first version of a system that would today be defined as Supply Chain Management Software. All previously set targets were met by the system. Later versions were developed for the AS400 and as of today all customers are using the Windows version of System A3 from TI-BAS.