A new report from AMR Research shows that the apparel industry is not spending as much on IT as it used to, and according to one of the report’s principal authors, this is a symptom of a much bigger and more serious, industrywide supply chain problem.
The report, “Top Technology Trends in the Apparel Market: The Third Annual Apparel Research Study and Analysis,” seems to show IT growth at first glance, reporting an industrywide increase of 1.7 percent from 2008 to 2009.
But the report, based on a survey of 175 responses from businesses in the apparel industry, goes on to cite a “softening” of IT spending in the industry. According to the report, 14 percent of respondents said they planned to spend less on IT in 2009 than they did in 2008, and 37 percent said their companies had “stopped, reconsidered or delayed previously approved IT projects.”
The report indicates the sagging world economy may be partly to blame, but according to David Aquino, a research director at AMR and one of the report’s principal authors, the lack of IT spending is most notable in core ERP systems, plus systems that would help connect global operations or establish and/or maintain the end-to-end supply chain.
