Being strategic means asking the right questions and meaningfully applying the learnings. How do you do this while innovating and outpacing the competition?
Agility requires a willingness to experiment and adapt quickly to changing market conditions and customer preferences. It also demands breaking down silos and fostering collaboration across teams.
Today, we’re going to talk about how leading brands are leveraging automation and AI to drive efficiency and optimize their merchandising and trading capabilities in today’s complex retail environment.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Karthik Ramakrishnan, Director, Planning Systems and RPA at Tapestry.
About Karthik Ramakrishnan
Karthik Ramakrishnan is a seasoned IT professional with 20+ years of experience in leading, architecting, consulting and delivering novel IT solutions. Karthigeyan has worked in the Retail IT industry spanning different functional areas ranging from warehouse management, planning, merchandising, customer service, automation and Gen AI. He has global consulting experience in various markets encompassing Europe, India, South America and the U.S. At Tapestry, he leads the Planning and Automation space. He is passionate about Gen AI and enjoys leveraging Gen AI to not just solve problems but identify new opportunities that are yet to be unearthed. He has a degree in Chemical Engineering from Anna University, Chennai and loves applying reactor design principles to technology solutions.
Karthik Ramakrishnan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthikram007/
Resources
Tapestry: https://www.tapestry.com
UIPath: https://www.uipath.com
The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:01)
Being strategic means asking the right questions and meaningfully applying the learnings. How do you do this while innovating and outpacing the competition? Agility requires a willingness to experiment and adapt quickly to changing market conditions and customer preferences. It also demands breaking down silos and fostering collaboration across teams. Today, we’re going to talk about how leading brands are leveraging automation and AI to drive efficiency and optimize their merchandising and trading capabilities in today’s complex retail environment. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Karthik Ramakrishnan, Director, Planning, Systems and RPA at Tapestry. Karthik, welcome to the show.
Karthik Ramakrishnan (00:41)
Thanks Greg. Good afternoon. How are you?
Greg Kihlstrom (00:44)
Good, good. Yeah, looking forward to having this conversation with you. Definitely lots to discuss here and very timely topic. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Tapestry.
Karthik Ramakrishnan (00:56)
Sure, Greg. I’m Karthik Ramakrishnan. I work for Tapestry in the IT department. A little bit of introduction about what Tapestry is. So Tapestry is a company that owns the brands Coach and Kate Spade. Each brand is unique, but Tapestry is a magical thread that weaves both the brands together. So Tapestry, as you said, I’m a director of applications for machineized planning, robotic process automation. In addition, I also take care of Salesforce Service Cloud, our homegrown corporate applications.
I also spearhead multiple generative AI initiatives and applications.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:29)
Great. Well, yeah, you’re the right person to talk with about this stuff. So let’s dive in. And as I said, we’re going to talk about a few different things. But I want to start with what I touched on a little bit at the very top of the show is just automation and innovation. And I want to start by talking about how tapestry defines automation at scale and how big a part automation plays in your approach to innovation.
Karthik Ramakrishnan (01:53)
Great question, Greg. would say this. Dapestry started our business process automation journey as early as 2019. We were one of the first five companies on the planet to implement SAP S400, and we just launched it in 2019. One of our core tenets was not to introduce customizations in package software or SaaS applications that would make the application complex. But we still wanted to help our users be efficient and feel productive hence the natural pivot automation and tools like UiPath that would eliminate complex, manual and mundane processes while maintaining a clean core of SAP. So from 2019 until now, we have automated several processes that touch SAP or supply chain systems, HR, IT and even modern generative AI applications all using UiPath. Now it helped drive down customizations, maintenance costs, while increasing our ability to upgrade. Now the productivity gain from automation helps Tapestry focus on innovation, which is more rewarding, engaging and beneficial.
Greg Kihlstrom (03:02)
Yeah. And so, yeah, starting in 2019, definitely ahead of the curve there as far as the the the A.I. bandwagon, let’s just call it. So that’s that’s really interesting to hear. How is the use of robotic process automation or RPA and A.I. influenced the organization towards more data driven strategies? So, you know, step one is automating, right? And then having the access to the data, you know, how does how does that drive you towards data-driven strategies and things like merchandising decisions and trading capabilities.
Karthik Ramakrishnan (03:36)
That’s an excellent question, Greg. In fact, I can speak for an entire hour on this topic, but I’ll try to keep it concise. Now automation, it helped transform our data validations, reconciliations, and journal entry creation, finished good purchase auto creation from several hours or even days sometimes into near real time. This helped Tapestry make faster business decisions in the areas of finance, supply chain, and many other domains. Combining the power of AI with automation
We have built agents that provide insights into our sales, inventory levels, foot traffic, website traffic, store associate and customer feedback in near real time. No static reports, no static dashboards and no technical queries. It is all achieved through questions in natural language. For example, we could have some of our users and execs ask, what was the sales of women’s bags last week in New York?
What were the top five best-selling products in California in June? What are customers saying about our Coach Tappy bags or Brooklyn bags? Compare the feedback from our customers in Texas and Colorado about Kate’s pay due across body bags and how does it correlate to sales patterns. If you look at these questions, some of these questions sound very simple, but the work performed by the agents in the background is monumental. The agents gather information from multiple sources, collect the information and present it to the end user. So with UiPath automation and AI, I think the era of static reports is ending. And we are in the process of building automated reports that would be sent out periodically by simply changing prompts. We are not there here at 100%, but we’re slowly marching towards that goal.
Greg Kihlstrom (05:21)
Yeah, yeah. And that’s that’s so powerful because having been one of those people that requests, hey, can you get me these numbers or and it sometimes takes, you know, days, if not weeks, sometimes to get the right reports like having that power at your fingertips is really powerful and does allow people to make more intelligent decisions and get answers to the questions more easily. You mentioned a few platforms and partners that you use.
Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what’s the role of finding the right platforms and partners and being successful with automation and, how do you choose the right tools for the work?
Karthik Ramakrishnan (06:00)
That’s a great question, Greg, because the role of these tools and platforms is huge. Right. So we are thankful that we chose UAPath for our automation platform because UAPath is robust, works seamlessly with web-based applications, thick lines like SAP and even software, SaaS applications. And do know how many support cases we have created with UAPath in the last five years? Zero. Wow.
So this single metric should speak for itself. I don’t want to say anything else about UiPath just with this single metric. Now, with respect to the choice of what tools you would choose, there are so many tools, a plethora of tools. But how would we choose the right tool? Our goal is to be very objective, have a scientific process. For example, we have a very well-defined evaluation matrix before choosing tools.
The tool needs to be a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant to demonstrate scalability, flexibility, adaptability to technology changes, secure, and also easy to maintain. Now, once we evaluate a certain number of tools and assess the scores, the winner is Joseph. It’s a very scientific process, and we have very good support from our leadership to help us choose the right tool.
Greg Kihlstrom (07:19)
Yeah, that’s great. so. Choosing the right tools and having that as you were describing earlier, having that the ability to ask questions in natural language, get answers to things instead of either waiting or, you know, worst case guessing or things like that. How has that plus other types of automation that you described, you know, how is it freed up teams to focus on more strategic and higher value activities related to things like merchandising and trading, you know, maybe provide an example.
Karthik Ramakrishnan (07:51)
That’s a great follow up question, Greg. So as I said earlier, we’ve automated tasks in many operational areas, just financial planning and analysis, cost center creation, lease management, sales and order, reconciliations, invoice reconciliation, cetera. So this allowed for more efficient operations, freed up our staff to focus on more intellectual and creative tasks. example, imagine in a finance teams, have highly qualified CPA performing manual reconciliations over a weekend or over a month in. And we want the CPA to perform tasks that they love and are far more rewarding to them and also strategic and beneficial to tapestry. So we have achieved close to, I would say, 25 % efficiency gain in all these categories because of automation.
Greg Kihlstrom (08:41)
you
And so, you know, implementing automation in any organization, even a small one is not simple, but doing it at scale with a large organization like Tapestry is certainly no small feat. What were some of the key challenges that you encountered during the implementation process and how did you overcome them?
Karthik Ramakrishnan (09:00)
That’s another good question. I think the challenges are very similar across multiple large organizations, but I will highlight the ones that we faced. I think the very first challenge is helping the end users understand the benefit of automation, its capabilities and limitations. We should explain the automation process in simple and plain English without using jargon to the end users. For example, we building front-end or UI-based automations we should explain to the user that the automation mimics the actions taken by the end user. Automation does not involve building new systems, dashboards, or metrics that were not already there. We’re not building phantom applications. I think that should be clear. And once we gain the user confidence, it becomes easier. Now, the second challenge I would mention is alignment with various system owners when automation touch multiple systems.
We have to explain to the system owners that the automation itself is not changing the system design, application design, or functionality. We are only replicating a user action in a much faster, efficient, and error-free mechanism. And please have the business or the users by your side. They are your biggest supporter. The third challenge I would mention is when the automation scales with more data. It is not just the automation platform that has to scale.
Greg Kihlstrom (10:13)
Yeah.
Karthik Ramakrishnan (10:23)
but the application systems that it touches also have to scale to meet the increased demand. Now, users cannot match the speed and volume of automations. So when the automations process data at a faster rate, can the application that it touches get it to the load? So this was another key learning that we had, and it helped us think ahead when we are building automations and we scale them.
Greg Kihlstrom (10:48)
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, a lot of what we’ve talked about so far, the customers, so to speak, are internal customers using the products, getting access to the data, and certainly a very important set of customers. But let’s talk a little bit more about those end customers as well and how the end customer experience gets enhanced. beyond operational efficiencies and things being able to be done more quickly, how has automation contributed to enhancing the customer experience at Tapestry Brands.
Karthik Ramakrishnan (11:20)
Awesome. So if you look at some of our automations, we have induced improved response times, reduced frictionless interaction between our end customers and customer facing teams. So we have built self-service automation for our end customers for some of our top contact reasons. For example, where is your order? Can we track the order? And order cancellation or changing certain features or parameters in the order.
Now, these self-service automations make it easy for end customers, especially with Generation C, who prefer interacting with digital products and digital ecosystems. So that’s an interesting area where we have made it easy for end customers to shop or to change their orders and contact customer service. And we are also continuously expanding the scope of these self-service automations to multiple contact channels.
So we have it in our digital products. Now we want to enhance it to phone, SMS, even Instagram in the future. And all these could be done with or without AI. So that’s another angle we are thinking is don’t try to solve all problems with AI, but we can solve many problems with simple but powerful use cases.
Greg Kihlstrom (12:37)
Yeah, yeah, love it. And so those efficiency gains, mean, certainly there’s looking at some of those those top use cases is really important. know, you know, depending on the person, I’m one of those people that does anything to not have to call customer support. So those automations are are much appreciated on that end. Building on that, though, you using automation and AI to personalize customer experiences. What about customer engagement and customer loyalty. Like how does, how does some of those improvements translate then to more loyal lifetime customers?
Karthik Ramakrishnan (13:13)
That’s another fantastic question. if you look at Coach, Coach is currently ranked fifth among the hottest brands in the luxury market. So we have climbed 10 places since 2024. There are many reasons for that. So we should thank our designers, our marketing teams, and the digital product teams that have built an ecosystem to connect better with our end customers, especially Gen Z. Usage of automation AI are key factors in this equation but not the only factor. So I would give equal credit to all the teams that helped us engage with our end customers better. So AI and automation are definitely contributing factors, but I think it’s a shared credit.
Greg Kihlstrom (13:56)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. mean, you’ve got to have great products and great design and all that and then back it up with great, great experiences and support and all those things for sure. Definitely looking ahead a little bit. Tapestry has been doing this since 2019, so definitely ahead of the curve and in many regards. But looking further down, what emerging trends in automation and AI are you most excited about and how do you see them shaping the future of retail?
Karthik Ramakrishnan (14:27)
I think it’s another interesting question where I can talk for an entire day, not just one hour, but I’ll try to keep it short. I mean, there are so many emerging trends, right? If you think about it, there’s computer vision, self-healing automations, and some of the LLMs outperforming traditional forecasting models. There’s AI engineering, AI-based app development. Now, I’m imagining a utopian face where an end user can build an app by just issuing a few commands or directives. For example, build me a tax engine that would incorporate all the latest rules from the federal, state, city, and local municipalities. Just talk to an AI tool or write it and it build the app for you. How cool that would be. There are also video and audio generation models that have paved way for a totally new world for us to create our own videos
for advertisement or even virtual dress fits. That’s another new world. think it’s an highly untapped potential, but I think few are marching towards that realm. And also think about completely new line of business that nobody has thought about, like a virtual tailor. So AI could be a virtual tailor, your phone or webcam could measure your physique, and somebody could build custom fit apparels that are stitched locally and are shipped
to the end users at a much faster rate instead of the product being manufactured in a different content and then shipped back to you. Then you can also think about physical AI bots as store assistants in the actual store to augment the store shopping experience for end customers. But also tell this, while I’m a strong proponent of AI and automation, I also want to reiterate that animation shouldn’t be confined to just AI and automation.
There are so many other ways that you can innovate and increase the end customer experience or make it better for end customers to shop and buy more products.
Greg Kihlstrom (16:35)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But yeah, lots of exciting things there and definitely look forward to to seeing some of those come to fruition. Karthik, thanks so much for joining today. Really appreciate you sharing your insights and the story that Tapestry has had so far with RPA and automation. One last question for you before we wrap up. What do do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Karthik Ramakrishnan (17:02)
That’s a good question too, Greg. So I would say this. think number one is staying passionate and loving what you do. Because when people ask me this question, even some of my friends or family members ask me this question, say, look, some people say you need to be disciplined, but I would refute that by saying, if you love what you do, the concept of discipline goes away. Imagine you’re in college and you’re
You love to spend some time with somebody, your friend, could be a girlfriend, anybody. You don’t need a reason to be with them. You don’t need to go to a concert. You don’t need to do fishing. You don’t need to watch a movie. All you need is just to be with them. That’s how you should feel towards some of the upcoming trends and technologies. You just need to love it so much that it doesn’t matter what time of the day it is, whether you’re even tired after a long day at work you’re frustrated or you have so many different problems, you would still go towards that. Now that’s the kind of passion I would say one should inculcate to keep in touch with latest trends and technologies. And the second most important thing that people have to realize is if you want to learn something new, you also have to unlearn some of the things that are already doing. Right? So it’s give and take. Otherwise there’s only 24 hours in a day.
this professional commitment and personal commitment. So what I’ve done is some of the professional comments I have had, certain areas are well established and runs like a well-loyal machine. I don’t need to micromanage it or don’t need to over-focus on those areas. Delegate the responsibilities, let your subordinates take care of it. And I’m sure they’ll do a good job and it’s up to us to groom. So they can take care of it while we focus on something that you like.
And it’s also more rewarding and, and, and The third most important thing is make sure that leadership is aligned with your goals are with what you’re trying in newer areas, because there’s no alignment. There’s no point. Nobody’s going to see the benefit. So I would say it’s a combination of all three passion unlearn or delegate what you already have and also align with the leadership.
