Four steps for building a collaborative digital supply chain

The American Fashion & Apparel industry relies heavily on imports. Global suppliers and factories are an integral part of sourcing and supply chain operations. Building strong partner relationships and improving visibility across the supply chain result in higher reliability, flexibility, and agility.

“98% of clothes and shoes purchased in the US are imported.”

To achieve this, focus on these key processes:

• Vendor Onboarding

You need to establish a digital onboarding process to track new vendor requests, vendor profiling, and segmentation, as well as an approval workflow to automate and track vendor onboarding approvals. Critically, establish a self-service portal for vendors, factories, agents, and buying offices to work together during the sourcing process.

• Supply Planning

You can easily share real-time supply forecast updates electronically with supply partners (suppliers, factories, and agents) through the cloud-based self-service portal. This enables factories to preempt fluctuations in demand and plan ahead collaboratively, which can in turn help improve lead times and expedite reorders in special circumstances.

• Order Issuance

Your order issuance process needs to be completely digitized through the vendor collaboration portal. Issuing orders to factories and suppliers in real time on the self-service portal enables supply partners to respond in real time and reduce order issuance and confirmation delays. That way, you can communicate any adjustments in size breaks or delivery destinations for immediate planning and action. The vendor collaboration portal also improves supply chain agility by providing a tool that lets you push customer-requested changes down to vendors electronically.

• Vendor Production Milestone Tracking

Every production department manages one or more production calendars for seasonal production planning and tracking across multiple brands and production groups. Production calendar indicators need to be tracked in the production system with real-time updates from your suppliers, factories, and agents through the self-service collaboration portal. Built-in reporting can help you preempt delivery delays and identify potential customer orders that may be impacted. Insights gained through milestone tracking can help you address and mitigate delivery risks, improve order fulfillment, and boost customer satisfaction.

You need an easy-to-use sourcing solution that enables you to execute collaborative supply chain processes via self-service portals for partners and vendors. HauteLogic by Visionet is perfect for supply chain integration and collaboration. Contact us today for a live demo to understand how our solution and services can help you achieve your goals.

 

This article was originally published on Visionet Blog

3 Ways to Overcome Apparel Supply Chain Uncertainty

One thing that every fashion and apparel business has in common is supply chain partners. Whether you’re an apparel manufacturer, retailer, or wholesaler, you’ll be communicating with a third party at some point in your supply chain.

This means that any hiccup in your communication cycle can hamper the overall delivery chain and may result in unhappy customers. No matter where you’re located, what fashion product you’re selling, or where you’re sourcing your raw material from, if you don’t have the right supply chain collaboration mechanisms in place, you can’t achieve sustainable business growth.

So where does supply chain unreliability come from, and what can you do about it?

Apparel Supply Chain Challenges

There are three primary factors that contribute to supply chain uncertainty:

Longer lead times for imported materials

As the number of well-informed and tech-savvy consumers increases, there is a proportionately higher risk of brand sensitivity. Any stock-outs or quality issues can divert your customers to competing brands that have a more responsive value chain. In other words, since full packed sourcing companies are completely reliant on vendors for the timely delivery of imported materials from multiple vendors to start the production process, the lack of a powerful vendor communication platform can result in longer lead times and put a strain on resources.

Tight delivery schedules due to seasonality

The fashion and apparel industry is replete with seasonal volatility due to holiday shopping, promotions, and sales. While this provides opportunities to attract high order volumes, mismanagement and lack of planning can have a negative impact on brand image and lead to permanent loss of sales. This creates a need for a flexible tool that offers more than just basic collaboration with vendors. It must provide near-instant response times and a complete view of all key performance indicators.

Inability to accurately estimate customer demand

Failure to predict what will sell the most, identify items that will soon go out of fashion, or discover new and lucrative consumer segments can cause companies to over-source materials that might not translate into sales, or under-source materials for products that may be in high demand. Organizations that base their estimates on guesswork instead of using data and technology expose themselves to profit erosion.

3 Ways to Reinforce Reliability

You can tackle these challenges by implementing a fully connected and integrated vendor collaboration structure across the following supply chain segments:

Production Planning

Using advanced analytics to project production plans according to consumer demand and identifying production issues earlier in the cycle through a well-connected business ecosystem will provide visibility to all of your vendors. This will help them plan for fallback material in advance and align on quick deliveries during highly volatile periods.

Seamless Order Issuance

Reduce steps from receiving production estimates to placing purchase requests, tracking orders, and clearing invoices by making sure that all data is aggregated in one place and is transparent to all third parties. You can accomplish this by reducing communication via email and auto-syncing business activities between your vendors’ systems and your own. This will reinforce proactivity and reduce last-minute deliveries and fulfilments, because all of your orders will be accurately placed in the right quantities with the right vendors at the right time.

Milestone Tracking

By bridging the gap between obtaining each order status from your internal supply chain department and following up with different vendors, advanced vendor collaboration technologies offer your organization the ability to track deep vendor milestones with automated notifications for any anticipated delays in predefined timeframes.

Your apparel firm needs more than just basic collaboration tools to gain the exceptional agility and market response time required in this industry. Join our experts at Visionet for an insightful webinar and learn more about how your fashion and apparel brand can maintain closer collaboration with vendors throughout the production and delivery cycle.

This article was originally published on Visionet Systems Blog

Collaboration, Agility, and Visibility: The Supply Chain Trifecta

Customers have become increasingly responsive to new trends and their range of preferences have also diversified, leading to an explosion in the variety of products being sold. High demand for product variety, especially in the case of short lifecycle products like food, apparel, toys, and computers, makes it challenging for manufacturers and retailers to forecast which precise range of products will be a hit with consumers. Extreme competition in the marketplace has forced companies to respond more quickly to customer needs through faster product development and accelerated delivery schedules. Only those companies that offer highly relevant products and deliver them on time receive their customers’ full support and appreciation. Manufacturers and retailers must join forces across the supply chain to become more effective in aligning supply with actual consumer demand.

Improving collaboration, agility, and visibility are the three most important ways to strengthen your supply chain. Each of these three attributes offers multiple operational enhancements for manufacturers and retailers in the fashion, apparel, and consumer goods industries.

Collaboration

Through collaboration, manufacturers and retailers can meet customer demand better by sharing sales information amongst themselves to generate accurate demand forecasts. Sharing information up the supply chain can help companies proactively adjust to evolving supply demands, which leads to less on-hand inventory. Not only is continued collaboration with dedicated partners the best way to reduce long-term supply chain costs, but it also leads to developments in product and process innovation. Instead of relying on telephone conversations or email, leading enterprises use modern communication solutions that seamlessly transfer relevant business information between trading partners’ enterprise systems. Using a specialized business communication solution based on electronic data interchange (EDI) or more modern direct-B2B technology is a great way to ensure secure, reliable, and efficient partner communication.

Agility

High agility enables your business to identify and respond to disruptions to ensure quality customer service. With complete operational integration from manufacturing to delivery, an agile supply chain can adapt to virtually any situation, from vendor reliability issues to unexpected spikes in demand.

Real-time demand data and accurate forecasting make your workflow and production volume more flexible and contribute to greater business output agility. In-depth business intelligence tools can keep track of this information and analysis, and share it with relevant stakeholders across your entire supply chain. More advanced BI tools will notify you if specific performance metrics exceed predefined thresholds that indicate the need for your immediate attention, and cutting-edge solutions use machine learning and heuristics to identify problematic situations, even if they’ve never been encountered before. Techniques like robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent process automation (IPA) can improve agility even further by initiating corrective actions whenever specific events occur. This allows your business to continue operating according to changes in demand, supply, and other market trends, even when human decision makers are not immediately available.

Visibility

Real-time visibility across the entire enterprise is absolutely crucial for informed decision making, order tracking, and inventory management. When new trends emerge in customer or production data, it is important for this information to be in the hands of people that can make value-enhancing business decisions. Organizations with total supply chain visibility don’t measure business through operational silos, with each department or business function operating in isolation. Instead, they take a cross-functional approach that provides an integrated view and allows decision makers to gauge overall performance. Having a fully integrated solution enables the system to seamlessly pull in information from across the enterprise, including production, warehouse, delivery, and sales.

Fully-integrated ERP solutions can help you enhance your organization’s collaboration, agility, and visibility by unifying all supply chain business functions in an easy-to-manage, reliable, and adaptive manner. To learn more about how to leverage digital technology to reduce complexity and improve communication across the supply chain, join supply chain experts at Visionet Systems on July 26 for a webinar on “Improving Supply Chain Reliability with Deeper Vendor Collaboration”.

Source: Collaboration, Agility, and Visibility: The Supply Chain Trifecta