Adidas now allows consumers to design shoes by themselves

Adidas, a world-famous sports brand, is now banking on machine learning technology to understand consumer trends and preferences and incorporate it into its wide-spread supply chain. What this move does is it allows their customers to design the products themselves and have hands on it within 24 hours.

Speaking at the SAP Sapphire event in Orlando a couple of weeks back, the company’s CIO – Michael Voegele emphasized the role of digital technologies in making Adidas the best sports brand in the world. Also, he added that allowing consumers to have a direct impact on product design is as important as understanding consumer needs.

This vision of the company to co-create an advanced supply chain means that the company’s 50-year-old supply chain paradigm is on the verge of revamping. Yes! It nullifies their current policy to translate collective trends into shoes by spending 18 months. And now, consumers shall directly design shoes of their favorite look in the factory prototype shop and acquire the product inside a day’s time.

Adidas has come a long way now in implementing data science across the entire business functions. And this very initiative suggests how keen they are in shifting their focus towards consumers.

The area which comes under the purview of this idea will henceforth be named as “Store Factory” by Adidas. Moreover, the critical thing going forward for them is keeping pace with consumer demands by stocking up sufficient raw materials. This collaboration of SAP and Adidas to effect machine learning based manufacturing system within the store enables them to latch on to the creativity of consumers and offer a product quickly in turn.

Michael Voegele also believes this disruption will drive the company’s employees to be as powerful as the product. Furthermore, he said that the productivity of employees is only going to get better with the integration of data science into the work regime.