Making clothes and producing the right quantities is not an easy business that has been at the expense of the environment for decades: overproduction and full stocks are common problems facing the industry, be it on the brand, manufacturer or consumer side retail establishments. Many of them therefore reduce the order quantities in order to avoid these problems, but then end up in less profitable quantity ranges.
Seidensticker (Overseas) Ltd. is investing in technology to solve this problem: The vertically integrated men’s shirt and women’s blouse manufacturer has partnered with software provider Coats Digital to enable smaller, more complex order requisitions and reduce the time and cost challenges of meeting its customers’ change requests :inside to reduce at the last minute.
Respond quickly to order changes
“Companies that invest wisely in the right digital technologies to plan effectively, optimize operational efficiencies, and respond quickly to order changes will be in a much stronger position to weather the storm. We very much look forward to supporting Seidensticker’s robust digitization program to ensure the company always maintains a competitive advantage,” said Wesley Ekman, senior global sales director at Coats Digital, in a statement.
Seidensticker found that the teams planning capacity and lines didn’t have a good view of the key planning and workflow data they needed to seamlessly manage larger volumes of smaller jobs. These often require style variations, adding to the complexity. The family business also found it difficult to manage late changes made by customers to orders because business-critical data was siled across multiple sources. This meant teams could not collaborate from a single data source to quickly and effectively respond to late change requests.
Tackle faster, shorter and more complex jobs
“With industry-wide increases in manufacturing and raw material costs, as well as increasing requests for faster, shorter and more complex orders, we needed a solution that would provide full visibility into global capacity planning and workflow processes so we can make critical business decisions quickly and identify potential delivery issues early on in order to be able to react quickly and effectively”, explains Peter Tornow, Managing Director of Seidensticker (Overseas) Ltd., the step.
The Bielefeld-based company chose Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan to make its capacity planning and critical path fully transparent. This includes supporting four of our own factories and 2,300 employees in Vietnam, Indonesia and Bangladesh, who produce 420,000 items of clothing for the Seidensticker brand every month. In addition, there are five partner factories that supply garments for other brands and produce between 550,000 and 800,000 pieces per month.
“We anticipate that the implementation of FastReactPlan will significantly improve production efficiencies, increase on-time delivery, reduce workload, and reduce last-minute assignments from our planning teams across the business,” adds Tornow.