Hugo Boss and o9’s Integrated Vision: Building Planning Excellence in Fashion

This article is based on Hugo Boss' keynote at aim10x Digital 2025, and the speakers from Hugo Boss were Ivica Maric, Eduard Spitz, and Ralf Kromer. The full keynote can be found here.

Hugo Boss is undertaking a bold transformation guided by its CLAIM 5 strategy: a five-pillar framework focused on sustainable growth and digital innovation. The strategy centers on five strategic priorities: Boost the Brand, Product is King, Lead in Digital, Rebalance Omnichannel, and Organize for Growth. These pillars are not theoretical. They are operational levers actively shaping how Hugo Boss reimagines planning, integrates its systems, and aligns its people.

CLAIM 5: The Strategic Framework for Transformation

The CLAIM 5 strategy outlines five focal points that define Hugo Boss’s transformation:

• C – Customer-Centric Brand Building: Referred to as “boost the brand,” this pillar focuses on strengthening consumer engagement and market relevance.
• L – Lead in Digital: A commitment to digitizing operations across the value chain.
• A – Agile Product Innovation: Captured by the “product is key” philosophy, ensuring that innovation is central to business strategy.
• I – Integrated Omni-Channel Commerce: “Drive omni-channel” refers to blending physical and digital retail seamlessly.
• M – Mobilize for Growth: Known internally as “organize for growth,” this pillar is about setting up structures and systems that can scale efficiently.
  

These pillars collectively drive Hugo Boss’s overarching ambition: to build a transparent, data-enabled, and future-ready enterprise. Overall, the transformation is delivering impressive top-line growth. The fashion giant is seeing the benefits. They are completely redefining how they utilize data, make decisions, and collaborate across teams to drive business value across the entire value chain.

Turning Strategy into Execution with Technology and Data

Becoming a tech-driven fashion platform requires more than marketing or design evolution. It demands transparency, speed, and data-enabled decision making across every function. Hugo Boss recognized that its planning processes needed to be rebuilt from the ground up to support this ambition. That’s why it launched initiatives like upgrading its ERP platform, implementing a new product lifecycle management system, and deploying a next-generation planning suite.

A key principle of the new approach is having one version of the truth. The company is focused on eliminating fragmented forecasts and contradictory data by building planning processes that rely on a single, trusted data foundation. This unified approach increases product availability, improves inventory accuracy, and enhances decision making during volatile market conditions.

Bringing Integrated Planning to Life

To move from vision to value, Hugo Boss needed a partner that could support integrated business planning with the right balance of sophistication and flexibility. After evaluating several options, the company chose o9 for its comprehensive platform, which combines real-time integration, a harmonized technology stack, and a unified database. This means IT and business users no longer need to manage multiple tools or bridge disconnected systems.

With o9, the planning suite becomes a single solution that serves all planning needs—from demand and supply to product and finance. The result is a streamlined user experience, greater stability, and reduced operational risk. For the IT team, this reduces complexity. For business leaders, it increases agility.

A Culture That Enables Change

Change management was central to the planning transformation. Hugo Boss prioritized explaining the “why” behind the new system, ensuring all stakeholders—from supply chain to finance to business units—understood how the new approach would benefit them directly. The project was structured to support both top-down leadership and bottom-up engagement.

More than 100 team members were involved in building the solution. The company created a mirrored structure where business and IT leads were paired together, ensuring a shared understanding of process design and challenges. This tight integration laid the foundation for consistent execution and built the trust needed for long-term adoption.

Building a Data-Driven Foundation

While Hugo Boss does not have a centralized data organization, the planning transformation has helped formalize data governance and ownership. The planning suite integrates with the company’s Azure Data Lake and BW systems, ensuring that planning processes are informed by a consistent, reliable data environment.

Through the transformation, the company is developing frameworks for managing data quality, defining ownership, and tracking key performance indicators. These efforts are supported by cross-functional teams and are being extended across related programs like PLM and TWIN, Hugo Boss’s largest digitalization initiative to date.

Structure That Supports Scale

The planning transformation is organized around four key business streams: integrated planning, demand, business units, and supply. Each stream has a dedicated leader, and demand planning is further segmented into wholesale, retail, outlet, and replenishment. An end-to-end analyst role ensures that these workstreams remain integrated and avoid falling into silos.

To further drive adoption and ensure sustainability, Hugo Boss is establishing a virtual center of excellence. This internal structure will serve as the owner of both the technology and the processes. It will support business units and markets in embedding the tool and will continue to evolve capabilities post-implementation.

Partnership with Purpose

Throughout the program, the relationship between Hugo Boss and o9 has been marked by a shared focus on business impact. o9’s industry-specific knowledge of fashion, combined with a strong partnership approach, has created alignment across teams. This spirit of co-creation is reinforced by the fact that teams from both organizations are co-located on campus, working side by side to deliver results.

From the blueprinting phase onward, the planning suite is being developed as an integrated solution that brings together all streams—demand, product, and supply—into a single, cohesive system. The team is working under ambitious timelines and is already preparing for the first go-live phases.

Conclusion: Redefining Planning for Fashion’s Future

Hugo Boss is not simply upgrading its systems. It is transforming its planning model to support a future defined by agility, data, and collaboration. Through the CLAIM 5 strategy and its partnership with o9, the company is building a solution that enables real-time insight, cross-functional alignment, and sustainable growth.
This transformation offers a blueprint for how fashion leaders can integrate strategy, technology, and culture. By focusing on what matters—business value, trust, and innovation—Hugo Boss is setting a new standard for planning excellence in the fashion industry.

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