For over 100 years, Seidensticker has been one of the leading shirt and blouse manufacturers in Europe and boasts an annual turnover of $145 million. The 100 per cent family-run business is headquartered in Bielefeld, Germany and has its Asian headquarters in Hong Kong. The company also has its own factories in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. Seidensticker supports a 2,300-strong workforce across four factories, which produce 420,000 Seidensticker-branded garments a month. The company additionally has another five partner factories that provide garments for other brands—producing between 550,000 and 800,000 pieces a month, Coats Digital said in a media release.

Seidensticker found that without good visibility to key planning and workflow data, capacity management and line planning teams did not have the accurate data they needed to seamlessly manage higher quantities of smaller orders that often required style variations with increased complexity. The company also found it challenging to manage late customer changes to orders since business-critical data was siloed in multiple sources, which meant teams could not work together from a single source of data, to respond to late order change requests quickly and effectively.

Peter Tornow, managing director, Seidensticker (Overseas) Ltd, said: “We chose FastReactPlan following a strong recommendation from our HQ’s supply chain department and a highly compelling product presentation from the Coats Digital team.  With higher basic cost-to-make outgoings and raw material costs industry-wide, as well as increasing requests for faster, shorter, and more complex orders, we needed a solution that would provide total visibility to global capacity planning and workflow processes so we could make business-critical decisions quickly and ensure early discovery of potential delivery challenges to enable us to action these fast and effectively.  We expect the implementation of FastReactPlan to significantly improve production efficiencies, increase OTDP and reduce workloads, as well as reduce last-minute firefighting for our planning teams across the whole business.”

Wesley Ekman, senior global sales director, Coats Digital, commented: “Seidensticker is a world-renowned specialist in high-quality shirts and blouses, and we are absolutely delighted that this retail and manufacturing powerhouse has selected FastReactPlan to streamline and optimise its supply chain processes. Companies that invest wisely in the right digital technologies to plan effectively, optimise operational efficiencies, and respond quickly to demand changes will be in a much stronger position to weather the storm, and we very much look forward to supporting Seidensticker’s robust digitisation programme to ensure it consistently retains an ‘ahead-of-the-game’ competitive advantage.”

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (KD)