K3 Fashion solves the critical challenges faced by the textile industry
K3 Fashion is a specialised software solution designed for the fashion and retail industry, natively embedded within Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) to optimise inventory and distribution processes. Tailored for end-to-end business needs, it supports planning, design, sourcing, purchasing, logistics, and warehousing, driving operational efficiency and profitability. In an interview with Fibre2Fashion, K3 Fashion Portfolio’s Chief Commercial and Operations Officer Kimberly Morgan discusses how the company’s solutions solve the industry’s unique challenges and simplify processes across sales, finance, and operations.
Can you describe how K3 Fashion supports buyers in the textile industry?
At K3, we provide a comprehensive suite of services designed to optimise the sourcing and procurement process, built to address the nuanced needs of textile organisations. Our business planning services enable the creation of detailed sourcing and capacity planning including both vendor and their production facility levels. We allow differentiation between various purchase order types (sample vs bulk and raw material vs finished goods) enabling brands to split capability and divided into multiple orders based on destination or inventory needs. We have additionally included robust CSR capabilities ensuring orders are placed with vendors and factories that meet required certifications, including tracking certification statuses and planned renewals, proactively preventing issues prior to any purchase order creation and mitigating bottom-line risk.
How does K3 Fashion streamline the purchasing process for wholesalers?
K3 Fashion offers a way to split inventory using a systematic separation. While total warehouse inventory reflects one total number, within K3 Fashion/D365 brands can apply specific rules to separate certain inventory streams, avoiding certain customers or orders. Using this approach, brands can proactively reserve or even promise production to sales and (groups of) customers, without having to physically reserve inventory. This process applies to finished good items and materials to be used in production, enabling proactive inventory visibility, and eliminating purchasing uncertainty.
What specific features of K3 Fashion benefit manufacturers in terms of inventory management?
K3 Fashion focuses on eliminating channel silos which often-times is a main blocker to seamless inventory management. We deliver full channel visibility, enabling allocation across channels, using priority settings, and combining customer/store prioritisation, all offered as standard within our solution. This ensures the right customers and stores get their goods first, regardless of where the brand’s inventory lives.
How does your platform facilitate the design and planning stages for textile businesses?
K3 Fashion delivers PLM/PDM capabilities within D365 enabling critical path planning and workflow enablement right within the ERP platform. These capabilities kick-start and support the design stage, while in parallel, create business and collection plans, delivering a line plan. Our intuitive templates and product wizard tools deliver quick product creation, inclusive of critical fashion details such as wash/care, compositions, a bill of materials, and target cost and buying/production prices.
For planning the retail business, we have range planning used to build a merchandise plan, a retail buy and coverage records, used for replenishment management.
All features are within D365’s UX/ UI, enabling teams to work in unison, eliminating the need to adopt a new tool or process and capitalise on real-time data clarity.
Can you explain how K3 Fashion’s logistics and warehousing capabilities improve operational efficiency?
Our focus always falls to data transparency and singular source of data truth utilisation. K3 Fashion works in unison with D365’s landed cost module, where all logistics processes are captured, and is interoperable with any selected Warehouse Management System (WMS). When it comes to order allocation, we have restructured the ‘release to warehouse’ functionality, adding automated workflow processes and prioritisation rules, for efficient and business-aligned allocation.
In what ways does your fashion portfolio enhance financial warehousing for textile companies?
K3 Fashion’s Business Planning tool is used to plan sales, purchases, manufacturing, as well as projects, enabling reporting to be captured from an aggregate high level, down to an item or even option level (item/ colourway). We have additionally added seasons to be reflected as a financial attribute so that seasonality can be linked to transactions.
How does the embedment with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Commerce benefit your customers?
K3’s embedded position within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Commerce transforms a universally power-house platform to become ‘fashion’. Meaning, the unique needs of the industry, typically solved through 3rd party solutions or API plugins to external resources, are now built to standard within the same UX/ UI experience, optimising business processes and delivering a ‘Fashion 365’ singular solution.
What advantages do K3 Fashion’s standardised processes offer to buyers and wholesalers?
For any brand, access to options is critical! K3 Fashion’s processes align to one singular system, adhering to standardised approaches. This flexibility allows individual teams the ability to operate alongside each other, without the need for customised systems or tools.
One example is the separation of different types of sales orders at different moments across a season/ buying period. This allows different actions per order type focusing team efforts to deliver against a desired and profitable outcome.
How does your deep industry-specific IP address unique challenges faced by the textile industry?
K3 Fashion solves the critical challenges faced by the textile industry that other ERP systems do not address. K3 simplifies the salesmen sampling process, bringing monitoring, inflow, finances and internal sales-to-sales offices and external distributors within the system to be supported.
We break down channel silos allowing complete inventory visibility, to nimbly sell across any channel and legal entity, in an intuitive and rule-based manner.
By enabling allocation across channels, using priority settings, and combining customer/store prioritisation, brands ensure the right customers and stores get their goods first.
K3 Fashion extends retail with proper back-office functionality, to move inventory easily and to plan stores based on capacity and available future inventory, while equally supporting wholesale by separating different types of sales orders at different moments, ensuring a different behaviour per order type.
All capabilities live together in one complete solution, embedded within D365 for seamless organisation adoption and usage.
Can you elaborate on how K3 Fashion’s seamless embedment with D365 helps in reducing manual efforts and maintenance?
K3 Fashion’s north star focus falls to the fashion industry. By constantly engaging our end users, the industry’s practitioners, our roadmap is fuelled to solve real challenges in the most efficient and standard manner possible. By extending off D365’s code base, any technology we build eliminates the need for additional, competing tools, cutting costs and additional time to maintain. Our code is released alongside Microsoft, mitigating risk as well as delivering massive time savings, once necessary to test, install, and maintain multiple system connectivity.
How does your approach to eliminating the need for external technical inputs, APIs, and plug-ins benefit manufacturers?
Everything K3 builds aligns to standardised processes, and no one-off customisations or bespoke systems are necessary. Our embedded code enables a singular source of data truth, eliminating unnecessary APIs to connect disparate data inputs which reduces manual errors as well as delivers actionable real-data business insights.
What feedback have you received from buyers, wholesalers, and manufacturers about the impact of K3 Fashion on their business processes?
Our concept-to-consumer fashion-specific technology, intuitive nature, and ‘One Microsoft’ approach has been repeated countless times by K3 Fashion’s customer base.
Streamlining and simplifying processes across sales, finance, and operations while improving forecasting accuracy and reliability as well as further boosting customer engagement and loyalty are topics our Center of Excellence team discusses often with our end users. The impact of these changes has resulted in protected bottom-line volatility, elimination of duplicative technology investments, and increased brand nimbleness and growth.
How do you ensure high levels of customer service and support throughout the technology journey of your clients?
K3’s global partner community represents best-in-class organisations, which our practitioner-led Centre of Excellence team aligns with from project kick-off through to go-live. Through close partner and customer collaboration, K3’s team ensures platform adoption, translating the needs of the fashion industry into best-practice technical solution execution.
In your experience, how has K3 Fashion contributed to driving profitability for its users?
K3’s alignment to Microsoft ensures our platform always focuses on driving business process optimisation and real-time data visibility through the lens of innovation. The output of this approach can be recognised through the elimination of redundant tool investments, supply chain transparency translates to environmentally sound brand decisions and sustainable practices, and access to correct and real-time data ensures the most profitable decisions are made, proactively.
What future innovations can we expect from K3 Fashion to further support the textile industry?
K3 Fashion’s primary focus will always be to solve the industry’s unique challenges. What excites me is the opportunity to layer in Copilot and advanced AI models throughout the entirety of our platform. The topic of demand-forecasting, planning, and allocation presents a massive opportunity for K3 Fashion to solve – all interwoven within one solution and accelerated through the scope of ‘fashion’ paired with AI to further accelerate intuitive use, eliminate manual hiccups, and provide differentiated views to help brands redefine what business success looks like.
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