The fashion industry today is driven by tech-savvy and trend-obsessed consumers, and this behaviour has seen a significant rise since the pandemic. The fashion calendar has gone from two buying seasons a year to almost 12 seasons, with some brands even launching as many as thirty collections in a year!
These changing buying habits have pushed manufacturing companies to become faster, more flexible, and opt for new-age product development methods to keep up with shorter turnaround times. For fashion businesses, a shift like this requires building efficiencies not just on the shopfloor but across the entire supply chain.
Valued at US $861.50 billion in 2022, as per IBISWorld, the apparel manufacturing sector has to find the right balance between the high-quality expectations of long-time buyers and the dynamic demands of new-age customers. The industry is also grappling with problems caused by stunted supply chains, logistical roadblocks, and raw material shortages across the world.
The key to faster, smarter manufacturing is digitalisation
The apparel manufacturing industry has historically been built around rigid working methods and processes, but these have now become somewhat outdated. In today’s landscape, garment factories need to integrate technology into their production processes if they want to succeed. Optimising operational performance with digital tools is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.
While other industries such as automobiles adopted technology early on, apparel manufacturing sector is still trying to catch up. This is largely because of the lesser availability of technical solutions that directly understand the requirements of the fashion industry.
WFX – World Fashion Exchange – has been at the forefront of building tech solutions specifically for fashion businesses for two decades now. A market leader in providing modern, end-to-end integrated, cloud-based software for the fashion industry, WFX has empowered the apparel manufacturing sector to compete on a global stage. With 35,000+ users across 50+ countries, the fashion-tech company has enabled over 600 fashion brands and manufacturers find success in their digital transformation journey—including some biggest names in garment manufacturing like Asmara, Modelama, Aquarelle, Indochine, Phong Phu,Maliban among others.
“WFX has truly streamlined the entire production workflow at Song Hong. The features that have impressed me the most are: open-ended integrations (I love being able to access everything I need from a single platform), analytics and auto-generated reports (they help me spot trends in my data and track what’s going on with each project in real-time), and reusability of information for future orders and executions (I can learn from past hiccups and predict bottlenecks before they arise),” said Bui Viet Quang, CEO, Song Hong.
WFX’s modern cloud-based software suite has been phenomenal in helping leading garment manufacturers and brands overcome challenges, increase productivity, produce better quality products, have faster lead times and reduce costs.
The power of cloud and big data is a game changer for the apparel industry
There is a crying need for apparel factories to restructure and digitalise their operations. Issues in quality, production, IE, finishing and cutting rooms may sometimes seem miniscule but they have an enormous impact on performance and the bottomline of the factory.
WFX has designed its solutions to follow the complete production journey and streamline every function in the supply chain. Through state-of-the-art productivity features, WFX solutions drive higher efficiency and output across the supply chain; give organisations greater visibility into every stage of the manufacturing process;provide access to contextual insights about how things are running in real time; enable higher accountability; and allow management to quickly respond to issues in the most effective way possible.
How WFX is solving apparel manufacturers’ biggest concerns
Here is an inside look at how WFX is using technology to help apparel manufacturers tackle their most pressing challenges and empowering them to become more efficient and sustainable.
Tackling rising input costs with optimised resource allocation
Input costs in apparel manufacturing have skyrocketed over the last few years. Labour costs across geographies have shot up as the cost-of-living increases.Prices of raw materials are surging uncontrollably, having almost doubled since the pandemic.Energy prices continue to trouble the industry, especially as the Russia-Ukraine war rages on. Not to forget, rising inflation has deepened the gaps in the consumer market.
When it comes to running a business in today’s climate, manufacturers need to be on their toes. They need to be aware of the hidden costs in their operations and keep an eye out for ways to cut them—or else they risk losing everything. WFX ERP helps manufacturers do just that by keeping costs down in many ways across different levels.
With WFX’s inventory management tools, resource managers can track materials used in each step of the production process, so that they always know exactly how much material remains on hand. They can also watch out for any bottlenecks or areas where excess materials are being used and make adjustments accordingly.With material being largest input cost in any garment firm, controlling it gives factories a huge advantage. It allows them to better allocate finite resources and optimise efficiencies across the board.
Supporting better decision making through centralised data
Decision-making based on instinct is a thing of the past. Fact-based decision making has become paramount for organisations which want to stay competitive. All apparel factories, regardless of size, have a tremendous amount of data just ‘lying around’ that can be studied to prioritise processes, track production, and report against orders and schedules. The data can also help teams identify where they are going wrong and what is the scope of improvisation, in order to produce merchandise in the lowest possible cost.
WFX is committed to helping garment factories make data-driven decisions through their centralised garment ERP system. By allowing factories to create a ‘single source of truth’, WFX enables companies to see the big picture of their business. The management can access information from multiple channels and business units in one place, allowing decision makers to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves.
Further, business intelligence tools in WFX can be used to track key performance indicators and generate insightful reports that can be accessed manually or scheduled to be sent automatically to CXOs on a periodic basis.
WFX also offers standard and custom-built integrations with all major software products including Oracle NetSuite, FastReact, Tally, Adobe Illustrator, Shopify, SAP and more. This ensures that no data is ever lost and managers can keep track of all operations through a centralised system.
Replacing error-ridden manual tasks to boost accuracy and speed up processes
Due to the nature of factories, it is difficult to track the processes in real-time and human intervention can make things even more complicated. Without technological intervention, it is nearly impossible to accurately maintain hourly numbers, track efficiency and ensure defect/rework/rejection levels. Such human-driven failures can cause major disruptions in a factory, which impacts profitability.
WFX’s digitalisation features allow factories to automate most mundane tasks, freeing employees from routine data entry, so that they can focus on more productive work. At the same time, digitalisation also eliminates the risk of lost or miscommunicated information, which can lead to mistakes in production.
Meeting the rising demand for sustainably-produced clothing
Today’s consumers are more informed than ever before. They want to decorate their wardrobes with sustainable clothing, and this trend is growing rapidly. Not just this, but consumers also want to track details such as: Who made their garments? Were the raw materials used in production sustainable? Were there any wage violations in the process of making this garment?
Brands have no choice but to pay attention to this, and this demand for compliances is transferred to their factory vendors. This means that the onus to be transparent about manufacturing processes stands with the manufacturer, who now have to lay a strong emphasis on sustainability in garment production.
When it comes to providing solutions for sustainability, WFX allows factories to manage and share all compliance related information, it gives them better visibility of the ongoings of the production units so that factories can ensure that standard operating procedures are being followed everywhere.
Simplifying global tariffs and tax differences on imports and exports
The apparel manufacturing industry is one of the most complex and challenging industries to manage. From thousands of SKUs to multiple countries, taxes and tariffs can add up quickly. To top it off, there are many variables that can affect the cost of manufacturing or importing a product into a country. This can turn costing into a frustrating process. These problems are often due to the lack of transparency in the supply chain, which can lead to double handling or the creation of excess inventory.
WFX’s financial module is built specifically to tackle this problem for the apparel market. The costing and budgeting features in WFX have been designed to handle multi-language, multi-currency and multi-country invoices and tariffs to make the financial and accounting process simpler and streamlined. Garment companies which often conduct business in different countries around the world, may find this feature immensely useful in saving time, effort and money by avoiding costly translation errors.
“WFX’s Cloud Enterprise Suite has catapulted us to a more digitally run organisation, and enabled us to manage our business more efficiently and intelligently,” said Sharaz Hilmi Farouk, General Manager, EAM Maliban Group.
Without technology, it’s difficult to stay ahead of the curve in a competitive business landscape
Nowadays, efficiency, visibility and ‘speed to market’ are the most important factors when brands evaluate factories. The main problem of many factories is that they have a lot of information they need but it’s in different places, which makes it difficult to collect it all at once when needed because there is no integration between these different database systems. This lack of integration means there is no single version of the truth.
This is where factories are falling behind in the race, as such exercises are not just frustrating, they are also costly and time-consuming. Businesses that can cope with new demands in real-time are far more likely to be successful, and technology plays a crucial role in making that happen.
“Digitisation is the way forward for the fashion industry; there is no alternative. If you wish to run a successful apparel business, you have to leverage technology sooner rather than later,” said Jatin Paul Director-World Fashion Exchange.
To learn more about WFX’s software solutions for the fashion and apparel industry, head to www.worldfashionexchange.com.
