Pacsun, the leading speciality fashion retailer of the California Lifestyle, has continued to transform its business digitally. In 2021, Antuit AI (now part of Zebra technologies) was deployed to improve profitability using the Antuit intelligent allocation and replenishment solution. However, underpinning these insights requires a reliable supply chain. It has now selected the Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform to handle its contract lifecycle management.
Pacsun will not constrain Icertis to assist with just its supply chain but every agreement within the organisation. These will include merchandising, construction, and real estate agreements. The transformation of its contract management will assist the organisation in ensuring regulatory and industry compliance, and it will also maximize the value of corporate contracts.
The announcement was made at NRF, where Icertis is demonstrating its solutions for relevant industries, including Retail, CPG, and Distribution. The Icertis solution aims to evolve contracts from paper filling a filing cabinet to a strategically advantageous data repository
Shirley Gao, CIO, Pacsun, commented: “Pacsun is committed to being digital-first when engaging with our customers and vendors. It is important that we lean into advanced technologies for the foundational elements of our business, including contracts.
“Transforming contract management has become especially important in an ever-changing retail ecosystem. After considering several CLM solutions, we chose Icertis for the company’s best-practice platform functionality and innovative use of AI to unify contract data, as well as the company’s deep retail knowledge.”
Addressing the growing challenge
Founded in 1980 as pacific Sunwear, Pacsun has evolved and grown to supply over 350 retail stores and its online store with brands including Vans, Kendall and Kylie, Brandy Melville, Adidas, and Fear of God Essentials, as well as its own. Pacsun is committed to sourcing products ethically, equitably, and sustainably for its youthful target market. Its Pacsun Eco range embodies this approach.
Pacsuns continued expansion, and a growing range of suppliers, brands, distributors, and other partners needed to automate and streamline its supplier management processes. Legislation around sustainability and other supply chain factors meant that Pacsun needed to improve efficiency sooner than later.
It sought a solution that would automate the process and enable internal teams across legal, finance, merchandising, and IT to collaborate better. The intent is to modernise its contracting process by providing a centralised solution to increase efficiency and provide visibility across the organisation. Every contract would be held in the central repository, analysed and leveraged to transform contract management across the organisation. Icertis will impact many of its functions, including:
- Merchandising and Marketing
- Supply Chain
- Digital Fulfillment and Distribution
- Retail Management
- Information Technology
- Corporate M&A
- Legal
- HR
- Finance
Pacsun will also deploy several add-on solutions to enhance the CLM as part of the implementation. These include the Icertis eSignature Adapter, perhaps using DocuSign or Adobe through the existing partnerships.
Pacsun will also deploy Discover AI, enabling organisations to digitise and extract attributes and clauses from legacy and third party documents into the ICI platform. This rapidly accelerates implementation and will enable Pacsun to understand existing contracts better. Icertis surfaces the insights are in dashboards that automate the specific key performance indicators (KPIs) of contracts to ensure compliance.
Icertis – ready-made for retail
Digital Transformation is happening across all organisations. While some see this as a flight to the cloud for existing business applications, manual processes exist that still require digitising. One of these is often the management of contracts. As companies start out, they have a handful of contracts dealt with by an individual. As they grow, the number of touchpoints and contracts rapidly increases. Digitising the contract process is vital to support further growth and avoid the risk of compliance failure.
Retail is facing many other pressures as they need to become more agile in the face of supply chain issues. These often force a supplier change, and a slow onboarding and contracting process can inhibit the business to the point of failure.
For Icertis, Pacsun is one of a growing number of retail, CPG, and Distribution organizations that has selected its platform. Others include Best Buy, Johnson & Johnson, Saint Gobain and Treasury Wine Estates. Icertis also launched an industry-specific CLM solution for CPG & Distribution last year; it has since added retail.
Phil Barry, senior director, retail industry solutions, Icertis, commented: “Pacsun is a great example of an innovator embracing digital transformation of contract management in order to thrive in an unpredictable ecosystem.
“We are thrilled to be partnering with the Pacsun team to arm the business with a full view into all their contracts—from corporate agreements to merchandising and supply chain commitments and everything in between. ICI will make a significant impact as PacSun continues to grow their business.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
While Pacsun is a US-based organisation, it has a global supply chain and needs a global CLM platform to manage it. In Icertis, it has found one with integrations that will enable it to merge it into its existing IT architecture.
NRF has started well for Icertis with this announcement. It will hope to close or commence several other engagements with the US and global organisations attending the event.
What is interesting about the Pacsun choice of Icertis and Antuit AI, is that it is not just digitising its business. It is also embracing Ai technologies. That forward-looking thinking should stand it in good stead for the years ahead.
