How Infor helps knitters and weavers deliver orders on time and at a profit

Transcription

1 Fashion How Infor helps knitters and weavers deliver orders on time and at a profit As manufacturers have mechanized knitting and weaving, these ancient arts that were once completed by hand, have become capital machine intensive businesses. The basic stitches or loops in knitting or weaving have not changed for hundreds of years, yet because these techniques define the characteristics of a textile, they must be done accurately so that these products can be delivered on time and in the most efficient manner possible with amazing speed.

2 Plan for the best use of equipment and raw materials Knitters and weavers are early links in the fashion supply chain where each step in a garment or textile s creation is a step toward delivering an end-product to the customer. Success arrives from accurately scheduling and maintaining the machinery that helps deliver these products complete and on time. Some of the challenges and tough decisions facing the knitting and weaving industry sector include: Predicting customer demand. Knowing when to purchase raw fiber. Minimizing non-productive time managing your bottleneck resources. Building products to stock in the right quantity at the right time. Tracking whether product groups are making or losing money. Managing inventory to control costs. Remaining innovative so you can stay far ahead of your competition. In this paper, we will discuss how Infor Fashion can help with all of these challenges. How Infor solutions can help Infor Fashion is an integrated enterprise management system designed for the needs of knitting and weaving manufacturers. This solution provides manufacturers with the functionality to integrate the business activities surrounding the weaving and functions like dying, kettle scheduling, scheduling of orders on looms, creating complex color weaves, cone/spool changeovers, and roll management. With Infor Fashion, knitters and weavers can support customer, purchase, and manufacturing orders, and: 1. Plan for demand needs In order to meet the rising demands of brand owners, wholesalers, distributors, and retailers, knitting and weaving manufacturers often need to make decisions on fabric colors and quantities long before they have confirmed customer orders. At the same time, forecasting customer demand and calculating raw material requirements to make purchasing decisions requires strong analytics and forecasting tools. In this way, the optimization of machine resources will mean greater profitability. With Infor Fashion, knitting and weaving fabricators can analyze sales and order data to identify trends and capture sales intelligence in forecasts through account managers or from customers. 2

3 Infor Fashion includes collaborative demand planning and business intelligence tools to generate more accurate forecasts and enable better, faster decision-making. With Infor Fashion, knitters and weavers can analyze historical sales and order data to identify trends and capture sales intelligence in forecasts either through account managers or directly from customers. Infor Fashion can then provide early warnings when a business actuals deviate significantly from forecast, providing the flexibility to take action quickly. 2. Accommodate for fluctuating commodity pricing Because of the volatility of commodity pricing, a relatively small swing in price can have a significant impact on a textile fabricator's profitability. An increase in the price of cotton or synthetic fibers can increase the cost of the finished goods, and if those costs cannot be passed on to the customer it's the textile mill that must absorb the costs. To accommodate for these fluctuations in pricing, raw material buyers need to hedge against significant increases and reductions in market prices and exchange-rate fluctuations. Having accurate information on material needs and requirement dates helps your buyers make smarter buying decisions. With Infor Fashion s material planning tools, manufacturers can accurately calculate raw material requirements to guide their buyers on how much of a specific natural fiber or chemical needs to be purchased, as well as the date when the purchase should be made. The automatic generation of raw material requirements based on the demand plan and a system built to easily handle often volatile fluctuations to cost and inventory valuation provides a clear purchase requirements plan, easing communication with suppliers and allowing buyers to focus their time on obtaining the best price and handling exception situations. 3. Optimize the utilization of bottleneck resources With order quantities that are often small and short delivery times, equipment scheduling is crucial to on-time order delivery. At the textile mill, bottleneck resources may be fixed or wandering throughout the weaving room depending on the order mix and resource capacity for each process step. Infor Fashion provides powerful scheduling tools to help with the selection of the best machine within a group of possible machines for each order. 3

4 After selecting the right machine, Infor Fashion can help sequence the operations for the different orders scheduled on that resource, thus minimizing changeover times. As in all capital equipment intensive production environments, asset maintenance is key. Breakdowns and unplanned downtime during seasonal peaks are a threat to profitability. To ease this pain, Infor offers enterprise asset management (EAM) capabilities that can be used to track assets and plan preventative maintenance at suitable times to improve reliability and avoid the risk of unplanned production downtime. Infor EAM can also be used to track and manage energy usage to save on costs and boost an organization's sustainability credentials. During equipment downtime, machines can be cleaned and torn down. This is a process that takes time both as a safety precaution for the workers running the machines and as a precaution against fiber contamination, or even something as simple as keeping like-colored fabrics running in a sequence to avoid color mixing at the dying or weaving level. To aid in this process, Infor Fashion includes enterprise asset management (EAM) capabilities that can be used to improve plant and equipment performance by helping to eliminate unplanned downtime, and directly address energy waste. To avoid changeovers and lost time, Infor EAM can be used to schedule preventive maintenance, and assign resources where they'll do the most good this helps to extend the longevity of manufacturing assets. 4. Build the right stock to meet the right orders No manufacturer wants to commit to building high inventories of new seasonal colors before they have firm customer orders in place. Therefore, it is often good practice to build inventory on classic products that sell in high volume traditional black and white shades, for example. This practice avoids the associated risk of building inventory buffers that may not be needed or sold at a profitable price. Infor Fashion has powerful tools for planning cost-optimized stock build-ups to meet seasonal peaks in demand. Given a forecast demand, resource capacity, and costs, it can generate the ideal stock build profile to meet a business' goals. This data can then be transferred to become part of the master schedule. The material planning respects the stock build, which becomes part of the production plan that the production department works to fulfill. With integrated financials and analytics, Infor Fashion can monitor business performance and track what inventory is available to sell, the financial value of inventory to build, and the risk to be managed. In the end, building stock on the right patterns minimizes the risk of obsolete products and helps ensure the delivery of customer-specific orders in season without jeopardizing other orders. With Infor Fashion's integrated financials and analytics, you can monitor and track the financial value of inventory to build, what inventory is available to sell, and the risk you need to manage. 4

5 5. Manage and monitor profitability Infor Fashion includes a comprehensive, integrated business intelligence platform with industry-specific analytics that provide financial and operational dashboards, charts, KPIs, and drill downs. These tools are tailored to the needs of different functional business roles. For example, there are financial measurements for the financial team, sales KPIs for the sales team, manufacturing metrics for production, and so on. Infor Fashion s analytics tools can analyze data by brand, product group, color, or season. 6. Control inventory to reduce your costs For many manufacturers, inventory control can come down to having too much or not enough. Stockpiling any pattern or color could create an inherent risk will these materials be needed later? Natural fibers can have different storage requirements than synthetic fibers, for example. Or, certain customers can require that specific materials be used in the manufacturing of their textiles. On one level, knowing if inventory can be carried over for a few seasons can be cost-effective in instances where similar textiles are used seasonally. Depending on the time of the year, manufacturers can build up basics in their inventory that they know will be in demand. Not only will they have some product on hand, but at an equipment level this frees up equipment. And on an even more micro level, Infor Fashion can control the inventory information from workforce planning in the distribution center, down to the smallest detail of raw material inventorying. For controlling the ingredients used in batch scheduling of dyes, Infor M3 Graphical Lot Tracker can be used to create a visual picture of how a manufacturer s processes are functioning, so they can easily see if routines and procedures are followed for a specific batch or product. That way the right ingredients and materials will be on hand when they re needed. 7. Use innovation as a competitive advantage The pattern a designer creates for a fabric defines a textile s ultimate composition. Competitive differentiation comes from fabricating textiles that have the right characteristics or a new set of characteristics to meet customer demand. Whether it s different width, color, shade, shrinkage, or quality, Infor Fashion can be used to plan, design, develop, cost, and produce new, innovative products. This is accomplished with Infor Fashion s collaborative product lifecycle management (PLM) capabilities that cover everything from product concept, through design specifications and development, to sampling and transfer to production. 5

6 How you benefit As with all businesses, ebbs and flows in activity need to be planned for so the best work is produced in the best possible manner. By helping to plan for the use of raw materials and machine assets, Infor Fashion can help knitting and weaving fabricators simplify every aspect of your supply chain operations. Infor Fashion has tools for planning cost-optimized stock build-ups to meet seasonal peaks in demand, while its integrated financial tools provide an up-to-date view of business performance. With this supply chain visibility, Infor Fashion gives knitters and weavers all the tools you need to avoid equipment and machinery bottlenecks and better meet customer demand. Visit Infor Fashion to learn more Share this : Copyright 2015 Infor. All rights reserved. The word and design marks set forth herein are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Infor and/or related affiliates and subsidiaries. All other trademarks listed herein are the property of their respective owners Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY INF en-US