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Textiles and Garments

Companies in this domain are export houses which undertake garment manufacturing for large retailers as per fabric or garment designs given to them. They could also be fashion retailers who design, source and sell garments under their own brands in addition to selling other garment company brands. These two types of companies (textile manufacturers or fashion garment retailers) can develop a constraint in Operations, Sales, Retail operations or in Sampling.

Operations

Our Offer

Around
50%

Reduction in overall lead-time

Upto
25%

Increase in output of textile manufacturing

Upto
40%

Reduction of WIP

Improvement in working capital cycle of the company

Most garment and textile manufacturers in India are facing severe pressure to reduce not just costs but also to reduce lead time of supply of garment orders. The pressure on costs is emanating from the gradual change in product mix of garment orders being received. Over time, garmenting orders have shifted from being for few garments in large volumes to a large variety of garments in smaller volumes. The pressure of lead times is emanating from retailers who want to reduce the fashion forecast horizon. The twin pressures of increased variety of garments and low lead times are making it necessary for textile and garmenting units to make fundamental changes in the way they operate. Most manufacturers are not coping well with these demands; they are suffering from drop in output, poor delivery performance, and month-end skew in output of garments. These issues are further driving up costs of garmenting and jeopardising future order bookings.

With the help of Vector Consulting, textile and garment manufacturing plants can ensure near ~100% On-Time-In-Full deliveries with significant reduction in lead time. At the same time, they can increase the garment output and significantly reduce working capital deployed in the business. Find out how.

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Sales Bandwidth

Our Offer

More than
100%

Release capacity of sales team

Increase the rate of acquisition of new customers

Increase in sales rate of new garment categories

Significant time of sales teams in textile and garment manufacturing companies is used up in order management. When every garmenting order has multiple co-ordination points for approvals with clients, the sales team bandwidth is mostly occupied in short-term tasks required for execution of orders in hand. This consumes capacity that is needed to develop new customers or introduce new garment categories.

Textile and garment manufacturing companies can increase bandwidth and effectiveness of their sales teams, and, simultaneously, improve the service levels of orders on the shop floor. Know how this is possible with the help of Vector’s consulting expertise in this domain.

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Retail Operations

Our Offer

Around
20%

Growth in same-store sales growth

More than
100%

Improve garment inventory

Increase gross contribution per unit of shelf space

Improve display and freshness of garments on shelf space

Fashion houses having their own retail footprint are typically constrained by store shelf-space (or working capital) for displaying garments. Slower the inventory ‘rotates’ on available shelf space, lesser is the money that the retail store makes. Fashion retail stores’ inability to fully exploit the limited shelf space in the store arises due to two reasons. Firstly, about 15 to 20% of the garments become bestsellers and gets stocked out within few weeks of season onset. Unfortunately, most fashion houses are not able to react to this by restocking (due to the long lead time needed for development and supply of garments). Secondly, about 30% of the garments turns out to be duds. When this happens, immediate effect is of blocked working capital. This also eventually causes margin erosion due to the inevitable deep discounting necessary to shed these excess garments.

How can fashion retail companies drastically reduce the impact of garment stockouts and surpluses, and at the same time, release working capital for funding expansion plans? Find out

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Sampling

Our Offer

Upto
50%

Reduce garment sampling lead-time

Upto
50%

Increased Output resource base

Reduce rework

Improved quality of output

Rapid bulk garment production

Reduced stress on people and other resource

Once the supply chain is aligned for seamless flow of orders, the next level of constraint for any textile or garment manufacturing organization is its ability to offer new garment variety based on the latest trends of fashion. In order to do so, the company has to have an agile garment sampling process. However, lead time of garment sampling expands either due to queuing delays or priority conflicts with bulk garment production. Moreover, fabric and garment designers are also caught in priority conflicts as they try to fulfil requirements of multiple sales channels. Consequently, garment sampling process can be a major bottleneck for bringing in new customers and for converting enquiries into orders.

Using flow principles of TOC, textile manufacturing and garmenting companies can transform the sampling process to align it with the goal of timely completion of orders. This would also help the companies to release substantial capacity to do more (garment sampling) from same resources.

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Case Studies

Discover how textile and garment manufacturing companies like Pratibha Syntex, Raymond Textiles, and many others are using “pull” systems of Theory of Constraints to dramatically reduce their ‘fabric to fashion’ lead time and gain a competitive advantage in the markets.

Pratibha Syntex Ltd: Transforming textile and garment manufacturing using TOC

Find out how textile manufacturer Pratibha journeyed from struggling to profitable. Learn how, with the help of Vector Consulting Group, it now offers one of the shortest lead times in the market and assures high reliability of orders to customers.

  • Indicators
  • Remark
  • Profits
  • Increased by 58%
  • Production lead time
  • Reduced by 50%
  • Delivery OTIF (On Time In Full)
  • Improved from 35% to 95%
  • Garment turnover
  • Increased by 120%
  • Overall output
  • Increased by 40%
  • Working capital
  • Reduced by 33%

Clients

We have partnered with large, fully-integrated textile manufacturers and fashion retailers to create and implement radical solutions which have redefined industry benchmarks. These include:

raymond
Raymond-Zambaiti
pratibha
trident
Dollar

Client Speaks

shreyasker-chaudhary
Shreyaskar Chaudhary
Managing Director, Pratibha Syntex Limited

With the help of TOC, we enhanced performance (and profitability) by improving reliability and lead times. Alongside this, we were able to extract more output from the same capacity. All these together have given us a competitive edge in the market.

Q. What are the major challenges in your business ?

A. The greatest challenge for us is ensuring reliability in supply to our customers, most of whom are brands and retailers based in Europe and US. This has now been compounded with the need for quick response and increased flexibility in product offerings. Unfortunately, Indian textile and garment manufacturing industry has had a legacy of poor reliability of orders.

Q. Why was ensuring “reliability”, “flexibility” and “speed to market” a tough challenge operationally?

A. In addition to garments, we market intermediary products like yarn and fabric. The available manufacturing capacity of the plant was shared between external orders ((yarn/fabric customers in the market) and internal orders(finished garments).In the past, this sharing system, and the inability to synchronize various items of raw material needed for completing orders was creating disruption (erratic cycles of starvation and overloading) in flow of yarn and fabric required for garment orders. So, in spite of high WIP, expensive finite scheduling software, and frequent expediting meetings, the lead-time was high and highly variable; orders were not being dispatched on time.

Like others in the textile and garment business, we tried to solve the problem by under-loading the plant. This dented profitability.

Q. What motivated you to embark on the TOC journey?

A. Our due date delivery performance was inconsistent. Airfreight and penalties, lack of affirmative action to grow the business due to inconsistent supply was causing considerable losses. Additionally, customers had been consolidating their supply chains and had been threatening to pull out unless we delivered. To survive and succeed in this very tough business, we knew we had to improve operations in a very short time. With the help of TOC, we aimed to enhance performance (and profitability) by focusing on reliability and on shortening lead-times. At the same time, we wanted to extract , more output from same capacity.

Q. What were the paradigm changes implemented?

A. The most important change is that now our entire supply chain is realigned to ensure reliability of customer orders. Output improvement in the plant became the welcome side effect!

We completely revamped our operations.

First, the focus of the company was changed. Amongst our three lines of business, garment manufacturing and supply became top priority. Fabric sales was discontinued; yarn was made to subordinate to the garmenting requirements. Some capacity was set aside exclusively for strategic yarn customers.

Second, WIP was capped at a reduced level (compared to the level in the months before implementation) to ensure that there were few orders on the shop floor. This forces the departments to complete work on the orders in hand. This enabled planning team to be conservative and spared some capacity buffer, while allowing execution team to aggressively use any unused capacity and maximize output.

Third, to discipline expediting efforts, a clear and visual priority system was put in place for the benefit of shop floor and vendors.

Our core issues arose from the fact that various departments were blind to how local decisions were affecting garment orders. So, these three processes, which define the boundaries within which local considerations (for productivity) can prevail (without delaying orders), ensures that operations always work on correct orders.

Q. What has been your experience after implementing TOC?

A. Now, customers receive their orders on time (and in full assortment) with a considerably reduced lead-time. This motivates them to continuously increase our share of business. We’ve halved the lead-time for key customers’ garment orders. We’ve accomplished this reduction in the existing system without hampering other normal lead-time orders.

Further, the shop floor exigencies used to consume a major share of senior management time. Now the system is largely working on “Auto Pilot” with very little intervention needed from senior management. This has released our bandwidth significantly and we are now able to focus on the future. We have now been able to invest and strengthen and reap the benefits of an enhanced Product Design & Development Studio with design support centre in Europe.

India’s edge as a low-cost supplier is blunting. By building agility into our operations, we aim to become a manufacturer of choice for global fashion garments businesses.

Pratibha Syntex