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ADD, an apparel company took stock of its business through a client-based online solution. By Mehak Chawla
When Thirumoorti RA, CEO & MD of Apparel Direction and Design (ADD), established the company back in 1996, he had thought little about the use of technology in his business. However, about half a decade back, Thirumoorti realized that no business could run without the assistance of technology.
Tirupur (India) based buying-agent (ADD) is one of the better known companies in India’s knits hub. It supplies over three million high value garments every year to buyers in the USA and Europe and has recently forayed into the domestic market as well.
As its operations expanded, both internally and internationally, managing scale and ensuring on-time delivery to customers became a major challenge for the company. Elaborated Thirumoorti, “We realized that we were unable to take complete control over our merchandise and where it was traveling and whose hands it was passing through.”
That is why, about three years back, Thirumoorti started scouting for IT solutions that could take stock of the company’s supply chain and bring about a degree of accountability. After much deliberation, Thirumoorti went in for Axind’s ChainReaction Source solution.
Since ADD forayed into the domestic market, last year was a crucial one for ADD as it integrated the ChainReaction solution with its domestic corporate sales. The integration, according to Thirumoorti, didn’t come without its pain points, though in the end, it all turned out to benefit the company.
ADD wanted to provide its employees and customers a solution where customers were provided with instant information about their shipments.
Thirumoorti said, “Our mission was to create innovative products, supply high quality garments and establish long term business relationships with customers. We have sourcing offices in India, Hong Kong and Jordan and marketing offices in USA and Canada. All of this made our task tougher.”
Moreover, there’s a lot that can go wrong in the garments business. “Right from the size to color or type of cloth, the chances of errors are huge. Multiple delivery locations further complicate the scenario,” said Thirumoorti. As a result, ADD was looking for a centralized solution.
Tech in time
The timely infusion of technology saved nine in ADD’s case. Thirumoorti had been experimenting with several ERP systems but he had always found the flexibility of solutions to adapt to his business lacking. “ I haven’t been able to achieve over 50-60% of implementation for other systems because customization has been a big problem,” revealed Thirumoorti.
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Flexibility was, therefore, a key consideration that clinched the deal in favor of Axind Software. Axind is a company that specializes in PLM for the retail and manufacturing verticals and Thirumoorti felt that such an organization would be able to gauge the needs of his business comprehensively.
ADD implemented Axind’s ChainReaction Source solution. This solution is Web-based. Sanjoy Sahgal, MD and CEO, Axind Software, commented, “Our solution is completely Web-based. It runs on a single Microsoft SQL Server instance and all that the client needs to use this application is a browser.” It’s a client-based system that has a footprint of 40-50 MB.
Since it is Web-based and highly flexible, Axind had no problems in tweaking this solution to suit ADD’s specific needs. According to Thirumoorti, this application not only helped him take stock of his wares but it also enhanced accountability. “I can now analyze which merchants are not meeting their targets or pinpoint the merchants with the maximum number of incorrect deliveries,” said Thirumoorti.
Accurate shipping information is critical for space and personnel planning at the ADD head office. Before the deployment, the information was stored in Excel sheets. According to Thirumoorti, the quality of this information has significantly improved and all of the shipment information is directly integrated into ADD’s systems at the head office today. Key forwarders are also integrated into the system so that they can see in advance when their services would be required.
2011 also saw some significant upgrades of the application and integration with ADD’s online and domestic business. The expansion of the new system and its integration with the parent app, said Thirumoorti, was seamless since the solution is a Web-based one and, for this reason, a highly scalable one.
The system, explained Sahgal, works almost like a supply chain system for a retail firm, the only differentiation being that a client can tweak the solution as per his business needs.
Challenges and results
Thirumoorti observed that one of the major challenges that this implementation faced was to make the merchandisers follow a set pattern of recording data. “The ways of working, procedures and operations for each of the buyers is different and yet there is a need for centralized control and coordination of all of the operations. A further challenge was to get the merchandisers to work in a standardized way,” he said.
The change is one of mindset, something that has accelerated in the last couple of months since the number of people using the system has gone up. This has been a hurdle to overcome for both ADD and Axind. As a result, training sessions running into over three weeks were organized in order to better acquaint the users with the application.
The other big challenge was deciding upon the solution itself, since Thirumoorti didn’t have a full fledged IT team in-house to manage the solution. That was one of the prime reasons for opting for a Web-based solution that would not require extensive infrastructure or management.
Now that the system is settled into the workculture, Thirumoorti has been able to derive some tangible benefits. “Our on-time delivery rate went up from about 60-65% to 80-85% because of this solution. For the past few months, we are doing more than 90% of our deliveries on-time,” summed up Thirumoorti. He also plans to expand the application as and when the company expands into specialized retail.
Axind on their part, have also made this solution browser agnostic, are planning to integrate it with Skype and extend it to tablets.
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