Textile company achieves 10% fast production cycles with end-to-end tracking

About client

Our client is a textile manufacturer who transforms premium fabric and raw material into high-quality garments for different types of customers. They run 50+ manufacturing operational units across the state, with skilled professionals, trusted legacy fabric suppliers, powered by their unique craftsmanship.

Challenges

The client had to collaborate consistently with different vendors over time, which resulted in many challenges that also affected their production lines. They had to streamline their production process while identifying underperforming vendors, optimize costs, and reduce the order cycle time.

Aging orders: They couldn’t deliver clients’ orders, resulting in delays up to a time period of 19 days, 61% longer than their earlier orders. This delay is mainly due to the reason as their company couldn’t receive goods on time from vendors and had a high cycle period of 10 days. So, they couldn’t meet their committed delivery deadlines.

Stock-out risks due to pending POs: They had more than 35% pending purchase orders, which resulted in delayed delivery from vendors. This often led to delayed deliveries and potential stock-out issues.

Poor vendor performance tracking: The company didn’t have a place of reference to identify and recognize high and low-performing vendors. So, they didn’t have visibility over vendor performance factors like quality, cost, delivery effectiveness, etc.

Demand - production alignment: They had multiple vendors for each fabric type and specification. For instance, material composition like cotton, organic, Egyptian, Supima and type of the fabric like plain, satin, oxford, etc. The client felt the need for in-depth blend-wise and weave-wise insights into these categories, which could help them align procurement with demand and production.

datakulture solution

To fix their issues regarding vendor management and procurement, we have developed an analytics solution. For easy tracking, we made the purchase order analysis into a dashboard that displayed the following insights in real time.

Top vendors: List of the top, best-performing vendors who deliver on time, and help with on-time production. This helps them view and focus on reliable vendors, along with their completed orders, production impact, cost, and everything else.

Aging analysis: Plotting aging analysis and cycle time analysis in the form of charts to identify the bottlenecks in the procurement process. The regular alerts, status sharing, and easy monitoring led to 35% reduction in aging orders. Also, cycle time analysis tracking led to 20% reduction in cycle time.

Order status monitoring: Showing finished, unfinished, and in-transit orders that gave visibility to track orders that are pending and required immediate attention.

Fabric distribution analysis: Made in-depth analysis for different fabric types and material composition, which ensured the balance between the demand and procurement is met. The analysis helped them reduce the risk of overstocking or under-stocking specific materials. They could handle specific material requirements despite having varying requirements and current stock levels for each fabric type and subtype.

Vendor cost tracking: Cost tracking and analysis component helped them manage finances better and look for cost saving opportunities, without leading to shortages or quality compromises.

Conclusion

The transparent monitoring of vendor performance helped their procurement unit plan cash flow management and even enjoy cash savings. Overall, they could function with improved efficiency, with fewer production delays, material shortages, and supply chain bottlenecks. All the 20% reduction in cycle time and 25% reduction in aging orders led to 10% fast production and on-time product delivery to supply chain units across different locations, thanks to the descriptive and prescriptive analytics solution.