Leading production planning and control for garment manufacturers

In businesses with multiple factories, the planning process starts on the high-level planning board, which provides the ‘control tower’ view. This allows the Master Planner to manage total demand (projected and confirmed orders) and capacity, and have a consolidated picture of materials and pre-production activities across the business.

Key benefits

• Fast, detailed and realistic planning and order confirmation process, with informed order allocation and management of load versus capacity across multiple factories.
• ‘What if’ planning allows the Master Planner to ‘sandbox’ and consider various scenarios, including the ramping up or down of capacity and the implications reallocation of work across factories/to sub-contractors.
• Immediate view of order status with colour coding, drill-down and powerful search functions/reporting to support management by exception.

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Highly visual, drag and drop planning of the main manufacturing process (typically sewing), using standard minutes, efficiency profiles and start up/training curves. Schedules for supporting bottleneck processes (e.g. embroidery, screen printing), are automatically and dynamically driven by the sewing plan.

Key benefits

• Fast, detailed and accurate planning to optimise delivery and efficiency.
• Importing of production updates for monitoring of plan versus actual and quick re-planning.
• Colour-coded alerts, with drill downs supports early proactive action and management by exception.

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Full material requirements are dynamically calculated on LEAN pull principles based on the latest sewing plan, with inventory and open MPOs imported from the main business system to provide a completely up-to-date picture of material demand and supply.

Key benefits

• • Fabric mill and other material suppliers have clear visibility of priorities to meet the sewing plan from the very beginning, meaning less changes and chasing.
  • More on-time starts of production and a smoother production flow, means improved efficiency and delivery performance.
  • The need to carry higher levels of raw materials and Work in Progress (WIP) to act as a ‘buffer’ to protect on-time start of production is reduced.

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FastReactPlan provides a mechanism to ensure that all departments, suppliers and customers have shared priorities and clear visibility of the key tasks that need to be completed, by who and by when in order to hit on-time start of production. Target dates are dynamically updated based on the latest plan, and colour-coded alerts highlight late events for early proactive action, and failure reason codes supporting further analysis and continuous improvement.

Key benefits

• Shared priorities and clear visibility of key tasks that need to be completed to ensure on-time start of production.
• More on-time starts of production and less changes to the plan means improved efficiency and delivery performance.
• Helps identify reasons for failure and opportunities to drive continuous improvement.

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FastReactPlan’s integrated report writing tool provides the flexibility to add bespoke reports to the standard suite of best practice reporting that are delivered as part of the project. The new optional KPI Dashboard transforms data gathered in FastReactPlan into a series of pre-defined visual reports representing industry standard KPIs for garment manufacturing and control. Surfaced in Microsoft Power BI, the visually rich, interactive dashboards and reports provide senior management with up-to-date analytics of actual and projected performance supporting proactive action to drive continuous improvement.

Key benefits

• Planners and management spend less time ‘working the numbers’ and more time using data-driven insights to manage by exception. This allows early proactive action which drives improved operational performance.
• Senior management/director/owner has visibility of KPIs and focus for continuous improvement.

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Simple, robust and proven approach to data interfacing with a wide range of in-house, and commercial business systems from ERP and shop floor data collection, to PLM. To allow for appropriate data integrity checking by the receiving system, data is exchanged through an intermediary (shared) file system on an automatic basis (timed and/or triggered).

Key benefits

• Proven and quick to implement.
• Supports data integrity checking by the receiving system.
• Easy and quick to change.

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In addition to the wide range of deep and automated planning functionality that comes as a part of every FastReactPlan project, there are a number of optional modules that have been developed to meet the specific needs of different business types/models. These include:

• Advanced planning and scheduling (APS)
  Automatic planning of large volumes of orders in seconds considering multiple constraints and planning scenarios.
• Embellishment/laundry planning
  Automatic rescheduling of multiple connected manufacturing processes considering multiple constraints, including minimum production runs and lead times.
• Constraint (last and mould) planning
  Tracking and monitoring of machine/product specific tooling such as moulds, lasts and forms, to support efficient planning around hard constraints.

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