Walkaroo International

Walkaroo International, an INR 2000 Crore footwear manufacturer, is one of the pioneers in PU based footwear in India. It aspires to be the most preferred footwear brand by being first to continuously offer newer designs at affordable prices to the market.  

To be a leading brand in this fast fashion business, the company needed to shorten the time-to-market of its products- from concept stage to final design. Further these designs would have to be quickly manufactured and made available in various sizes to the consumers through their vast dealer network.  

However, earlier, with multiple projects running concurrently in new product development (NPD), involving teams across design, manufacturing, and procurement functions, there were problems of mismatched priorities and coordination.  Consequently, project delays, rework & capacity wastage of teams, leading to higher lead time to launch were the norm. Moreover, a forecast based system of manufacturing and distribution, led to frequent instances of shortages and surpluses of inventory in its warehouses. This resulted in lower availability and lost sales for the company.    

Using the principles of Theory of Constraints, Walkaroo shifted from ‘batch processing’ to ‘single design flow’ method in new design development. This allowed the company to break away from the erstwhile vicious delays and capacity wastages across the functions and thus improving its new product output.  At the same time, manufacturing and distribution deployed a rapid replenishment process with its suppliers, manufacturing units and supply chain to ensure the continuous availability of products across its various depots  

Within a year of implementation of these new processes in NPD and operations, the following results were realized.