Textile

One of the oldest industries, which fulfill the basic needs of mankind, is Textile Industries. It is labor intensive, raw material intensive, capital intensive, product intensive, inventory intensive and with just one exception i.e. profit margins, which are non-intensive. Most developed countries have passed on this business to developing countries and now source their requirement from them. The textile industries have changed tremendously in the last few years. To sustain competitive advantage, companies must re-examine and fine-tune their business processes to deliver high quality goods at very low costs. Most companies have now outsourced manufacturing to low labor. Globalization has led to increase in competition and quality awareness and therefore it has become very important for the textile industry to integrate itself with information technology to survive.

Globalization forced industry to design products as per global teams or for the global markets, collaboration across global partners forced industries to mix design tools and organizational requirements and to extended body of expertise to the suppliers as well.

There are growth opportunities in the emerging markets with

• Increased competition from the mature markets
• Promotional effectiveness
• Ever changing demographics and increasing consumer expectations
• Greater retailer sophistication and power
• Persistent and continuous cost pressures
• Cross-functional participation in the design process
  
  

Key challenges:

• Improve profitability by improving revenues, reduce cost and administrative chores
• Decrease prices – lower waste cycle thus minimizing production failures
• Leverage past work easier by spend less time hunting for data and reduce duplication in data entry and maintenance
• Innovate and Drive Productivity by establishing a single source of truth, collaboration with remote sites and suppliers, facilitate re-use of knowledge and control consistent processes across the supply chain
• Plan effectively and make precise decisions through improved internal communication and access single source of the truth
  
  

Benefits

Reduction in cycle time
As of now, allocation of material to specific customer order is not possible with the current system. Such allocations are useful for making deliveries as planned, as there is no possibility of the material, which is required by one order, getting consumed for different order. In such cases earlier order would get delayed if material were not available in the stock while production time is spent on other order, which could have waited without causing any problem.

Cost savings
Company losses 2% of its sales value in discounts, which are the result of surplus production, implementing quality management system can help to bring down excess production, as management will be assured of the quality right from the raw material itself. Supplier developer module would be useful in proper selection of suppliers, which can focus on quality, cost and delivery aspects of supplier.

Reduction in machinery downtime
5 % machinery downtime is attributed to non-availability of raw material in the stores. This is due to absence of proper planning system and due to communication delays at every place because of information recompiling. Prompt communication coupled with effective supplier selection module and planning system would be useful in bringing down the machinery downtime.

Improvement in sales
75 % customers place repeat orders. Three factors-price, order and delivery affect orders. Integrated system will definitely be useful on this account. Price is one of the causes of losing customers; there is ample scope for cost reduction and therefore company can offer lower prices and incentives to attract customers through integrated information management solution.

Customer satisfaction
Current system is ineffective in tracking problems related to customers. The response regarding effectiveness falls in unsatisfactory category. Capacity planning for received order also falls in average category. Efficient capacity management system can bring down the delivery time for execution of the order and improve customer satisfaction. This management scheme can be very useful in maintaining better customer relations with prompt response and by knowing their past history. Well formulated procedures for customer dialog will be useful in having better customer relations. It takes approximately 3 days to answer any of customer queries. This period can be brought down to a day, which will have very good impact on customer perception of the organization.