Zara

Zara: IT for Fast Fashion On a beautiful August night in 2003, Xan Salgado Badas and Bruno Sanchez Ocampo settled into seats at their favorite tapas bar in the Spanish city of La Corufia, ordered pulpo gallego (octopus Galician style), and resumed their argument. Salgado was the head of IT for lnditex, a multinational clothing retailer and manufacturer headquartered in La Corufia (see Exhibit 1 for a map). He was Sénchez’s boss, although the two men had worked together for so long that their formal reporting relationship mattered little. It certainly did not keep Sanchez from disagreeing with every point Sal gado made this evening as they discussed the point-of-sale (PCS) terminals used by Zara, lnditex's largest chain of stores. Sanchez was the technical lead for the POS system, so the matter was close to his heart. 1t's time to upgrade them," said Salgado. No, it's not." Yes, it is. It's risky to let them get so far behind current technology.” No, it's riskier to upgrade them just to ’stay current.’ -The software works fine now; we shouldn't touch it." But it runs on DOS, which you know Microsoft doesn't even support anymore.” 1 And you know DOS hasn't been supported for years now, and that hasn’t stopped us or hurt us," Sanchez replied. "We have the right to keep using the operating system-where’s the problem?” One problem is that the hardware vendor for our POS terminals could upgrade their machines, or some peripheral for them, so that they're not DOS-compatible anymore. Then where would we