Azim Group's Planning Efficiency Up 15% with Coats Digital

Established in 1975, Azim Group produces garments for leading brands in the United States, Europe, Asia and South America. Its clients include Calvin Klein, Inditex, Aeropostale, Berksha, Walmart, Kohl’s, Perry Ellis, Elcorte Ingles, Land’s End and Falabella.

Prior to implementing FastReactPlan, capacity management and line planning teams lacked the pinpoint accuracy required to respond to the buyer’s latest changes. As a result, additional effort and regular reviews were needed with merchandising to ensure all teams had a unified approach to delivery. With important information siloed in multiple sources across email, Excel spreadsheets and over phone conversations, manual planning processes proved time-consuming and inefficient. Based on insufficient data, capacity was often overbooked or under-booked, causing late deliveries and unnecessary rejection of new orders, Coats Digital said in a  press release.

“In the first year, our planning efficiency increased by 15 per cent and will continue to increase going forward. Furthermore, the new system has helped streamline key processes such as order confirmation, capacity forecasting and line allocation – providing more accurate results compared with previous methods. Ultimately, the increased efficiency is reflected in higher growth in our business,” Ehsan Islam, operations manager, Azim Group, said.

Azim Group now has all relevant information available in one platform, ensuring comprehensive data transparency and visibility across merchandising and planning processes, so that teams can update and respond to new information in an agile way. Now that minutes-based load vs. capacity monitoring has also been accurately established on true actual line plans, merchandising and planning teams can establish accurate plan-based capacity reports within minutes, guaranteeing a realistic capacity status, with timely warning alerts, to avoid overbooking or under-booking scenarios. 

“Following the implementation of FastReactPlan, we started seeing positive results quickly. The new system can process data much faster than the tools traditionally used in the RMG industry. Thus, it enables management to make more informed, data-driven strategic and financial decisions,” Farhan Azim, deputy managing director, Azim Group, explained.

With production plans made mostly at the style or even the PO level, a series of time-consuming drill-down meetings were often required to iron-out potential problems and ascertain the fastest remedy.  Re-plan changes were consequently difficult to apply quickly, resulting in late deliveries and confusion with regards Work in Progress (WIP) reporting and Time & Action (T&A) prioritisation, the release said.

Since implementing FastReactPlan, standardised PO, colour and delivery level visibility is now available across all departments, establishing one version of the truth throughout the business and a single source of all information for better-informed decision making. All departments are now using FastReactPlan to create accurate, real-time reports and daily activity priorities, including KPIs, all of which are readily available for all departments to see.  As a result, Azim Group has saved nearly six person days per month in time efficiencies – a 68 per cent time-saving in report generation. 

Realistic plan targets, factoring in robust efficiency targets by product type, learning curve requirements and the production line’s performance have also helped to significantly increase efficiency and reduce last-minute firefighting. Factory efficiency has consequently increased by 7 per cent; whilst Cut to Order, Ship to Order and Cut to Ship efficiencies have also increased by 0.37 per cent, 0.89 per cent and 1.36 per cent, respectively, the release added.

“The FastReactPlan team understood the technological gap we previously faced in our planning process and were successful in providing us with required solutions. The end result is a customisable and visual system which is easy to operate for non-technical individuals. The system takes real-time data and is able to auto-generate many key reports, hence saving person hours and increasing overall efficiency of all concerned departments,” Istiak Rana, manager, of IT & Communications, Azim Group, said.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (RR)