Zara Supply Chain Case Study

1.0 INTRODUCTION
In today’s business world, the fashion industry is one of the fastest growing and competitive markets. The volatile market along with the customer demands have made garment companies such as H&M, Zara and Benetton seek to improve their supply chain management processes to succeed.
Improving supply chain processes is many times difficult since customers are very fashion conscious and hence garment companies must constantly update designs as ways of meeting the customers’ expectations.
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the operations and different supply chain management processes undergone by Zara, H&M and Benetton over the last few years. Supply chain management is defined as ‘the management of relationships and flows between operations and processes’ (Slack 2012, p. 212). The structure of this case study is divided into four key stages; design, manufacturing, distribution and retail.
The paper will also focus on the four V’s which are

At ZARA and Benetton, the supply chain strategies are automated and well organized thereby making the supply chain not only effective by also reliable. While H&M has subcontractors, and supplies within its strategies. ZARA focuses on specialized garments and hence designed are often not repeated. Hence the garments have only a rack life of 15 days.
All three retail stores have similar operations strategies which all have pros and cons. Of the three stores, ZARA has the most effective strategy as its success is the garments are sold within 15 days and that ZARA has the highest number of stores. Vertical integration also plays and important aspect to ZARA success as places utmost importance on the designing phase and hence creates unique designs with short lead times at affordable prices. Additionally, by having manufacturing sites located globally, it allows diversity in the clothing