The Research on Private Textile Industry Information Resources Integration System in South of Jiangsu GAO Peng School of Management, Jiangsu Teachers University of Technology, P.R China, 213001 gaopeng@jstu.edu.cn Abstract: Based on the investigation about the current situation of the private textile industry informatization in south of Jiangsu province. The author analyzed the problems and causes that made the problems in the process of industry informatization and set up a set of information resources integration system to be suited to the private textile industry in south of Jiangsu province; discussed the total solution of the system, developing principle and key technology problems etc. and analyzed the guarantee factors to make the plan be successful in the end of the paper. Keywords: enterprise informatization, private textile industry, integration system, customization self-defined 1. Instruction With the rapid development of computer, more and more traditional industry can t be spared under a tide of information. The fierce market competition sets higher requirements for enterprises in the speed, quality, service, cost, innovation and agility. Textile industry is China's traditional manufacturing industry. It occupies a large proportion of the national economy and industrial structure and is the key industries of national information. With China's accession to WTO, the world market on China's textile product demand is growing which poses a severe challenge to the textile industry as well as an opportunity. Under such circumstances, to develop business management information technology applications which take comprehensive digital resource model as the core, to speed up the process of information to reduce operating costs have become the strategic choice to enhance the core competitiveness to the majority of the textile enterprises, especially small and medium textile enterprises. Current research on the textile enterprise information system focused largely on the industry ERP software applications, or existing problems in ERP implementation process, but few proposes an effective solution to t small and medium textile enterprises information resource management. This paper aims at the construction of private textile enterprise information management system in South of Jiangsu which can play a certain role in small and medium enterprises informationization. 2. The current situation and the problems of the private textile industry in south of Jiangsu informationization 2.1 Current situation investigation South of Jiangsu is China s textile industrial base since the ancient times. The area has collected one large quantities of fund- abundant country medium Textile enterprise, in addition each kind of privately operated Rural enterprise as well as the family the type textile workshop which has formed the multi-faceted export model industry colony. The textile industry has become the important cornerstone industry as well as the machinery, the chemical industry and so on. However this textile industry mostly belongs to the labor force intensity enterprise, the technique content is low, researches and develops ability to be weak independently, the fund scale is quite limited and the information foundation is quite weak. In order to change this situation, the local government has increased investment on the textile enterprise informationization in recent years. For the enterprises needs of improving their management level, information integration and business collaboration, different levels of informationization had carried out. In order to understand present situation and the benefit of textile information system 171
application, we carried on a questionnaire survey to 30 Textile enterprise's information situation including hardware facility, the software development and applied, the personnel participate degree and so on. The interviewed object includes State-owned business taking Wuxi No.1 textile Ltd. as representative, township private enterprises taking Jinhua Yashuai textile Ltd. and Jiangsu positive lake group as representative, some Domestic workshop type Small business in Changzhou area. The findings are summarized in below table: Table 1: South of Jiangsu Textile enterprise information hardware facility investigation list Enterprise type Quantity Have Completes Server type computer LAN Specialized Ordinary State-owned 3 3 3 3 0 Township private 12 12 8 2 6 Domestic workshop 15 10 3 0 3 Total 30 25 12 5 8 Table 2: South of Jiangsu Textile enterprise information software applies investigation list State-owned Township private Domestic workshop l 3 12 15 Software system type System development way Module quantity Excel 0 2 10 Desktop system 0 6 3 DB Integration 3 4 2 Management System Independent 0 0 0 Outsourcing 1 3 2 Purchases the 1 7 3 mature software Sole 0 2 11 Limited 0 8 4 Majority 3 2 0 Whether the Yes 3 7 8 chief leader participate No 0 5 7 Enterprises performance Enhancement 3 5 2 not obviously 0 7 13 We can see from the table that the information situation of State-owned business is quite optimistic. They have all Used the integrative system to carry on unified plan and the management of the enterprise physical distribution and the fund, which lead to good society and the economic efficiency; Domestic workshop hasn t achieved the information system basic condition in hardware facility, software popularization and fund scale; Township private enterprise has been greatly improved in hardware facility which LAN covering up to 80%, but information technology hasn t improved significantly with enterprise efficiency, and only about 40%. So, township private enterprise will be the focus of next 172
phase of the textile information. 2.2 Analysis about the current system problems 2.2.1 The effect of the system cluster is weaker Most private enterprises applied various business information systems to assist management, like CAD, CAM, invoicing system, Kingdee financial system, But the real achievement of the system cluster and sharing of data is only less than 30%. Between the various systems of "drying up" information silos caused by the phenomenon has seriously affected the textile industry to upgrade the level of informationization. Enterprise needs to effectively integrate CRM systems, E-commerce, supply chain systems, product data management systems, manufacturing execution systems, workflow management systems, enterprise knowledge portals, collaborative commerce systems and so on. System integration application will be the general trend. 2.2.2 Lack of the application system that qualify the industry character The investigation found that 70% of private enterprises simply buy a commercial software before they were to conduct a detailed investigation of demand when building information systems. Commercial software, including a high maturity, a complete management thinking, complete functions and high degree of standardization, can play an important role in improving enterprise management. However, the privately textile industry is a significant industrial characteristics of traditional industries: 1. It has the typical characteristics of the continuity of production. The industrial chain is longer than the general processing assembly industry. 2. It has a wide range of processes and products, but the product standardization is low; 3. Terminal market is personalized, diversified, the demand trends in small quantities to enhance; 4. It has a higher raw material supply sources, but only a single species of raw materials. Thus a common ERP software, in many ways, does not apply to textile industry. For example, the BOM in production plan system is necessary for MRP, but the raw materials is only cotton in textile enterprise, processing technology is rather special, therefore need to change the traditional BOM table to "cotton using table". So private textile enterprises should not be one-sided pursuit of the advanced software, it should be combined with industry characteristics, using tailor-made method, ask a professional software company to establish a suitable overall solution on the basis of detailed investigation in the business process and then develop an effective information system. 2.2.3 The major application range of the system exist the gap and the lack of spread The privately textile enterprises that carry on a integrated system mostly concentrate on external applications like invoicing and finance. As for the textile industry is concerned, production quality control, process management should be the focus of its informationization. Production is the textile company's core areas, only using lean production thinking to carry on a centralized management on quantity, quality of semi-finished production and equipment condition in various of processing can an enterprise have a more sensitive response to the market. Although some enterprises have used the overseas sophisticated equipment which has the automatic gathering data function, but the interface issue if very difficult to resolve. Production management system is therefore more difficult to implement. In addition, the poor performance of dynamic expansion of existing systems is also one of the issues affecting the efficiency of it. Each process has large of quality indicators which is constantly expanding in textile enterprise and it focuses on different indicators in different stage. Most of the existing software can do t user-defined on data show format, it must be the developers to achieve the content expansion. Since most of the existing software using C/S mode, system upgrades and maintenance more difficult, it also increases the difficulty of the implementation of production management system. 3. The construction plan about the information resources integration system of private textile industry in south of Jiangsu According to the present situation of South of Jiangsu private textile Industry information, usability, flexibility and other issues are the main factors of hindering the information process. Therefore, we must 173
establish a set of information resource integration system that qualify textile industry s own character. 3.1 Total solution plan Based on the system research to the specific business, the entire information system can be divided into six sub-systems of systems management, marketing management, inventory management, production management and finance management. The system uses C/S mode, the background using SQLServer or Oracle DB. All the data follow the concept of once input and multiple use, which fully reflects the information integration features. For example, for the dyeing textile industry, three subsystem modules of inventory, process planning and production subsystems are relatively strong characteristics. Inventory subsystem carries on effective management, control and supervision to various materials procurement, warehousing, and inventory. It includes yarn, colored-yarn and product management and every part includes the function of stock account, a running account and stock age analysis which eliminates the abnormal outflow of corporate materials and ensure a reasonable business inventories effectively. Process planning subsystem focuses on process order management. System will automatically calculate the amount of cast material according to the contract-like cloth, various type of yarn in the inventory and several parameters like flower-shaped yarn row list, warp and weft of 100 meters. It will also auto-cast material together to form a single yarn dyeing as the basis of production. Production subsystem includes three parts of production statistics, quality inspection and equipment management. It should provide native database interfaces with advanced textile equipment, develop timing of data transmission functions to complete automatic collection and summary of key producing quality data. Marketing systems and financial systems, relatively versatility, can be still used in commercial information system processing. System development process due to maximize the use of prototyping development methodology to maintain a high degree of flexibility. The developer must keep in mind the needs of the user to adjust the function until the system to achieve a more stable state. 3.2 The developing principle of the system 1. Practical principles. Information resource integration system must meet current operational requirements and be practical application-oriented. 2. Low-input, low-cost principles. 3. The principles of step by step implements. In general, the enterprise should focus on advanced technology and gradually improve the function of the system according to he current status of management infrastructure and computer application. In the technology the system should be guarantees of future scalability and feasibility. In the implementation, the sub-division can be achieved to perfect it step by step. But the step by step implementation must be carried out under the guidance of the overall design. 3.3 To set up the customization self-defined developing platform The current textiles information systems have some weakness, such as too many indicators, difficulty to expand system; so it is important to establish a customization development platform. The customization development platform includes self-defined functions, self-defined documentation and self-defined reports. Using dynamic Dw, Formula 1 and other external components to develop, the sub-modes which are parallel connected can use the above methods to do the customized development. The customized development is not only refers to the software interface style and the display format can be user-modified, but the basic data items, data processing logic and data reports can be customized by the advanced users. This is the real sense of "business process customization." In general, the customization development platform can achieve the following objectives: 1. Greatly simplified the system development work, so the developer can focus on the working of construction system framework, research core business process, improve the model library and middleware, fundamentally improve the quality of software. 2. Release the work of non-core business process definition and functional module development to the 174
end users, by doing this work the end users can not only better understand the business process but also improve their development skills. On the other hand, the customization development can increase user participation and stimulate the user's initiative, which is conducive to the system maintenance. 3. The customization development makes the system has quick response to the business process or organizational structure changes, and improves the system s flexibility 4. The grantee factors to make the information integration system be successful The information systems are not only a technical system but also a complex social system. Sunan private textile enterprises must pay attention to the following grantee factors to achieve the final success in informationization in addition to actively explore application software development: 4.1 To strengthen the effect of the top leaders in the process of the system construction Textile information system is a typical top leader project. In the process of design, development and implementation, it will touch interests of the parties which likely lead to encounter greater resistance. Therefore, the success of it can t do without the full support of the top leader. However, the majority of small enterprises top leader is rather weak sense of informationization. They equate information with computerization and act only as a user, not a barrier excluder. The situation must be changed. They must produce a clear understanding of information system s benefit and use their authority to remove obstacles to ensure the implementation of the system. 4.2 To Strengthen the introduction of the professional talented persons The successful implementation of information systems can not do without the participation of high-quality professional talent persons who not only understand the business processes, but also understand informationization. On the one hand, they can communicate between developers and users, on the other hand they can serve as an administrator to advanced function like permission setting, customization development platform using etc. So, the privately textile enterprise should strengthen introduction of professional by improving treatment and working environment. 4.3 The government should take more investment to the textile informatization constantly At present the majority of our enterprise information system investment is too large. Local government should respond positively to the national policy of information, act as "advocate" role, provide preferential terms to those who have obvious economic benefits based on information systems and support a number of enterprises that have strong willingness of information but lack of fund, which promote the development of textile industry information. 5. Conclusion The construction of private textile information resources integration systems is not only a technical system but also a complex social system. According to the total solution plan, we have developed a set of management information system and put it into use in some private textile enterprise in Changzhou and Wuxi. The practice verified that the system can get the better effect and qualify the expanding value to spread in a certain extent. References [1]. Wu Shiliang, Xue hengxin. Textile Enterprise Information Research on a number of key issues. Science of Science and Management of S. & T, 2004(11):106~108(in Chinese) [2]. Gao Peng, Xie Yinchen. The Research of the Construction and Implementation of Secondary Development System Model on Textile ERP. China Management Informationization. 2009(3):37~40 (in Chinese) 175
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