Outdoor Giant Columbia: The Value Geometry Of An Outdoor Sportswear

Rock climbing, hiking, camping

Surfing, skiing and bungee jumping

These 6 outdoor sports events

Which one is the first to enter your eyes?

Speaking of the real sense of outdoor sports may be far away from many people's imagination of mountaineering excursions. Extreme situations are common. This is why we should make adequate preparations for outdoor sports clothes.

The same clothes, we usually wear clothes to compete. fashion Degree, however, for outdoor enthusiasts, good-looking is secondary and "function" is the main point.

Outdoor sports clothing first consider how to meet the needs of outdoor sports, waterproof and waterproof is almost the standard of outdoor sportswear. Some high-tech clothes can even be light, breathable and warm at the same time. It is no exaggeration to say that the value of an outdoor sportswear often depends on its "technological content". Here, it's more like a technology competition that can't see integrated circuits.

Today, I want to introduce a "big shot" to this competition. It is a famous outdoor sport. brand -- Columbia

Founded in 1938, Columbia is currently one of the largest outdoor sporting goods producers and distributors in North America. As a well-known outdoor brand, one of the secrets of Columbia's continued market share is relying on the leading edge of technology.

"Columbia is dedicated to providing all-weather outdoor technology to our customers. This sense of technology runs through our products from research and development fabrics and tailoring itself". In 2007, Columbia set up a "performance innovation" team and developed more than 200 patents. In 2009, a cloth with temperature sensing and high breathability was developed, and the sweat cloth was automatically cooled down.

TurboDown insulation was developed in 2015. Material Science ;

OutDry super waterproof lining was introduced in 2016.

The leading technology advantages ensure that Columbia continues to occupy the leading position in the outdoor merchandise market share in North America.

The digital age is surging, and Columbia is actively seeking change.

In recent years, along with the wave of digital change, new and innovative companies are using big data and mobile social interaction to change traditional outdoor sports business mode. They improve their fine operation and speed up personalized design through big data analysis.

Faced with the rapid catching up of new companies in the way of "overtaking", for Columbia, on the one hand, we need to integrate different elements such as culture, social interaction, mobile and personalized needs into the product design according to the typical needs of different user groups. On the other hand, we should shorten the testing, modeling, design and production cycle, and further stimulate the innovation ability. Therefore, digital spanformation has become the strategic focus of Columbia.

However, when the Columbia readiness strategy is ready to be implemented, it is found that the original IT platform has seriously affected its need to spanform users, markets and products into production and marketing strategies through in-depth analysis.

Process: the scale of the company is expanding and product types are increasing rapidly, making the traditional design and operation management process unable to meet the development speed of the company and business.

IT system: business runs in traditional minicomputer ERP system, with high cost, poor scalability, and long cycle of system upgrade and application development. And server, storage, network hierarchical deployment management, operation and maintenance complex, troubleshooting cycle is long, business continuity and stability is facing challenges.

Three pronged, Columbia race against time.

In order to solve the above two problems, Columbia combined with Dell EMC, VMware, SAP and Cisco, carried out a digital spanformation from three aspects: big data analysis platform, cloud based 3D design room and modern IT.

The development of Columbia global business is based on DELL Yi Xin storage solution (VMAX-AF, Isilon), using the advanced big data analysis platform, greatly reducing the batch analysis ETL (data extraction, conversion, loading) cycle, to meet the needs of digital spanformation process for batch analysis, and also to meet real-time performance requirements of big data analysis.

The cloud management platform is introduced to realize the unified management of resources across existing IT resources and cloud. Meanwhile, based on the hybrid cloud 3D design laboratory, the 3D function and digital design process are integrated to achieve optimal design based on user experience.

With the help of open and converged architecture of modern IT (VxBlock), and centralized automatic management of cross flash memory, server and data protection, Columbia can realize load optimization and IT automation management by applying SLA and QoS.

Through this three pronged digital spanformation method, Columbia brings not only the improvement of the efficiency of the system, but also the cost savings, which is the foundation for Columbia's future digital strategy.

The VxBlock system shortens the configuration time of DevOps from 6 weeks to 2 hours, thereby speeding up new business plans, such as product design and production planning.

The whole flash memory system reduces the floor area, energy consumption and management costs, ensures the current and future performance of bulk analysis and big data real-time analysis, and significantly reduces software licensing expenses and future system upgrade procurement requirements.

Shortening the cycle from "creativity" to "production" to "listing", and meeting the needs of Recover Point and Data Domain at the same time.

Modern IT brings nearly 50% of IT cost savings to Columbia, while load optimization, dynamic configuration of IT resources and automated management, help Columbia release more IT resources for business innovation.

Columbia Sportswear chief information officer Mike Hirt said:

With our long-term partnership with Dell EMC and its product suite, our infrastructure has been modernized, more efficient, more flexible, robust and reliable.

For a growing company, it is no easy task for thousands of employees to work together and make feedback as a seamless team. However, digital spanformation makes it possible, from 3D modeling to business optimization, and then to the acceleration of supply chain, through the digital spanformation, Columbia can reach customers more quickly and efficiently.