“The trouble with automation is that it often gives us what we don’t need at the cost of what we do”, Nicholas Carr, American journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of ‘Does IT matter’.

While 21st century’s radical technological shifts changed almost every sector and industry’s business as usual, many players operating in labour intensive industries with customised product offerings find it extremely difficult to adapt and leverage technological advancements to their full potential.

Fashion houses too find themselves stuck in the middle, determining which technologies, solutions or tools are best suited to their existing operational practices and current business models. While organisations keep investing heavily in technologies and tools to make their processes agile, aiming to keep pace with the ever-changing competitive landscape, often, these technologies soon become dreary, unable to deliver any real advantage, and only bring more burden of documentation and reporting.

How Industry Reacted to Tech Advancements in the Past?

The transition started somewhere in the mid-2010s, with brands leveraging early versions of targeted solutions, including PLM modules, tech-pack builders and TNA trackers. However, due to high dissonance between skills of then existing manpower and relevant skillset required to leverage full potential of these tools, it narrowed the scope and daunted the pace at which these technologies were adapted.

The entire value chain of suppliers, buyers, designers and retailers were still heavily dependent on data, which was managed and circulated in spreadsheets, causing data redundancy, data loss, delays, reworks and siloed data management practices.

This bleak landscape started to look promising after emergence of SaaS and cloud technology, giving businesses much simpler, scalable, and implementable solutions. These solutions could now be customised to a business’s needs, were open to integrations with third parties, and were billed only on features selected.

Manpower too was getting technology literate, given an imminent need of upskilling for both present and future. Implementation of best practices using ERP, CRM and SCM solutions became common, and many businesses started investing heavily to either build or sustain their competitive advantage through these technological advancements. COVID-19 outbreak, and subsequent lockdowns proved to be an inflection point and landed a big blow to the traditional way merchandising, buying, sourcing and designing operated. 3D modelling, virtual fit sessions, sample approvals, need for product cataloguing and building digital shelf became the new norms to operate.

The Current Landscape

Presently, with forever increasing technological layers over operations and mushrooming new solutions, businesses are carefully recalibrating their IT strategy to align technology to operational excellence and not vice-versa. However, in pursuit of keeping pace with recent technological advancements, managers often overlook the fact that they cannot leverage full potential of a solution unless they create complimentary changes in existing processes/interactions. The idea of implementing ERP or any solution is to leverage best practices it brings along, and not customise those solutions to existing internal practices. Oftentimes though, organisations fail to acknowledge this fact and create complex customisations to suit their business as usual. In their pursuit to become a technological leader, some businesses even keep switching between systems every couple of years, thereby paying huge indirect costs of training, switching, implementing and disruptions.

This era of technological augmentation, where fashion businesses kept adding layers of technology over existing operations, has resulted in poor selection and integration of multiple systems. Many companies regularly face integration challenges between these systems, leaving their information vulnerable to attacks and data leaks.

The underlying problem is the specialised nature of operations and customised solutions catering to individual functions. And hence functions (departments) have their own solutions which are integrated to a centralised ERP. CRM, PLM and CAD are some of these systems which fail to interact comprehensively with each other, and yet, are critical to their respective functions for BAU (Business As Usual).

This complex landscape with multiple solutions, all having different touchpoints, oftentimes give mixed signals for various market changes and makes it difficult to clearly identify meaningful disruptions to chalk out action plans. Fashion businesses operating on long lead times and irreversible product line decisions are then caught off guard as they fail to respond on time, giving rise to price wars and wafer-thin margins for everyone operating in that segment. For example, a business witnessing muted topline growth may claim decrease in new customer enrolments through its CRM solution insights, but may simultaneously fail to marry it effectively with SKU level sales or design attributes to identify patterns of buying behaviour. It thus offers consumer promotions on enrolments, thereby marginally increasing conversions, but losing bottom-line and triggering price wars in the process.

How to, then, end this vicious downward spiral and break free to create a new dimension of sustainable competitive advantage? How to make systems agile and how to create complementary practices to leverage full potential of solutions? The answer to these can be found looking outwards and gaining insights from industries which operate under similar dynamics.

Learning it from IT

In the present context, complimentary practices refer to building generic skills and processes between cross functional teams which help enable efficient collaboration without investing in implementation and training of a specialised nature. These practices aim to serve as a binding agent without disrupting existing solutions and their architecture.

Creating complimentary practices helps a business develop sustainable advantage and leverage full potential of any existing/new solutions as this enables a function to focus on leveraging the specialised features and best practices of the solution instead of keeping tabs on data mismatch, data sufficiency and data reconciliation. This also helps chip away the bureaucratic layers from existing practices, making communications more transparent while simultaneously reducing reporting at each level. Neither these practices disrupt business as usual, nor do they open a separate communication channel. They can help build and sustain collaborative workflows and increase adaptation of best practices offered by IT solutions in a holistic way, giving various functions visibility to the outcome of siloed activities.

These practices and tools which are heavily leveraged across IT, are built to support dynamic business requirements where every project is customised and is bound to follow a critical timeline to meet. By nature, and criticality, these projects require constant communication, task allocation, ownership, tracking, reporting and many other aspects which resemble fashion and retail BAUs.

Though many apparel brands currently leverage these practices, they primarily brand them as IT practices and confine them to IT project management teams. Effortless in nature, they are powerful enough to bring a radical change to businesses without further burdening them with more complexities and costs.

Four such practices/tools are listed below, which can bring agility to the processes and may help deliver competitive advantage to a business.

As-is Analysis: As-is analysis is a powerful design thinking technique often leveraged in projects and process re-engineering to understand how the existing system behaves, maximising our understanding of the process from perspective of multiple stakeholders. This helps identify impediments, UDEs (Undesirable Entities), reworks and bottlenecks in a process, which then can further be used to recreate an optimised workflow without disrupting BAUs. It lays out the existing process in a connected workflow model, highlighting various nodes including start, decision, action, and end; thus, chalking out convergence and divergence of multiple flows, and clearly identifying UDEs and focus areas.

Agile Project Management: Traditional seasonal planning in the apparel industry follows a waterfall approach, which entails linear, irreversible flow from planning to execution. It is much like a waterfall where water can only progress to the next level with little to no scope of fixing anything in phases which are already completed. Once planned, waterfall approach negates any scope of incorporating market feedback, business shifts or new requirements, and delivers what has been planned, making businesses vulnerable to any disruptions.

Agile on the other hand, advocates a project management framework open to feedback and delivering value at the end of each sprint (A small time boxed event). This helps businesses to respond quickly to trends, competitor moves and any other disruption which may come as a surprise. This also helps eliminate process waste and reduces magnitude of failure. Zara is probably one of the examples of delivering fresh assortment every 3 weeks under operations which resemble agile principles closely.

JIRA: JIRA is a tool used across the IT industry to manage projects, prioritise deliverables, assign tasks, raise issues, monitor progress, and build co-ordination between cross functional teams working together. It is a simple tool with intuitive UI, which does not require any technical expertise to operate. It reduces unnecessary documentation, promotes ownership of work and gives a holistic view of current progress to all stakeholders in a minimalist dashboard view. It helps to time stamp events, generate automated reports and set target vs expectations while enabling teams with self-organising. It reduces dependence on multiple communication channels, including emails, and notifies everyone on real time about status changes/issues/flags. These capabilities can heavily be leveraged in apparel industry where cross functional teams seek constant visibility on tasks from others, and getting a holistic view of progress consumes a significant amount of time and efforts.

Scrum Teams: The concept of scrum teams highlights the essence of organising a small unit of cross functional individuals, assembled to deliver project goals. While traditionally apparel industry is structured in functions, the idea advocates forming specialised nuclear teams focused to deliver one objective only.

Imagine a small unit of individuals comprising a designer, a merchandiser, a buyer and a technician working together to deliver a range of 50 designs. This team is managed by a ‘Scrum Master’, who acts as a servant leader, removing any impediments for the team, and lead by a ‘Product Owner’ who prioritises tasks and deliverables as per evolving business landscape. The whole team works together towards a single objective— to deliver 50 designs in the given timeframe, trimming any departmental bureaucracy, approval and communication.

Conclusion

While organisations keep pursuing excellence through building new layers of technology, these practices offer business agility within existing infrastructure and help build complimentary workflows for leveraging full potential of any solution. They offer making operations agile, with little process waste and drive productivity within teams with cross functional expertise (which oftentimes use different systems for their BAUs), helping reduce documentation, increasing ownership, and giving live monitoring to all the stakeholders.

Traditionally branded as IT practices, these are essentially domain agnostic practices/tools which can be heavily leveraged within the apparel industry to make systems and teams handle disruptions and work closely to deliver value to the business, while simultaneously helping businesses generate more value from new/existing technology by focusing to adapt to best practices these solutions offer.