Just think for a moment! You have received an order and proceed to acquire the necessary materials. The materials arrive and you send them to the production floor. Your workers cut, sew, and finish the garments which now go to the warehouse to be shipped to your customer. 

Every step of the production process will cost your company money, but the question is: how much of that process adds value to your product? How much are your customers willing to pay?

Let’s start at the beginning:

(1) Ordering material:

 a) Have you ordered the correct material in the right quantity and at the right time?

 b) Have you consolidated your orders to reduce number of shipments and reduce handling cost?

 c) Have you made sure that your suppliers will guarantee delivery by the date you have requested and will send the
     exact quantity you requested?

If your answer to any of these questions is “no” you will have added extra cost in your production minutes in material handling.

(2) Materials receiving:

 a) Do you know when the materials arrive?

 b) Do you know in which section of your warehouse the materials have been placed?

 c) Do your workers know exactly where to find the materials so that they do not need to waste time searching?

Once again, if the answer to these questions is “no” your have added extra cost in your production minutes in material handling.

(3) Movement of materials:

 a) Do your workers need to distance to bring the raw materials from the warehouse to the first stage of production
     (i.e. cutting, knitting)?

 b) If you have multiple warehouses and multiple production site, is the routing of the transportation complicated?

If your answer to either of these questions is “yes” you will have extra labor and materials costs that add no value to your product. And again, increase the cost of your production minute.

(4) Sewing or knitting the panel:

There are many production steps in the core assembly process.

 a) Material will need to move from one workstation to another. Are the workstations close enough to prevent the
      workers from moving the semi finished goods too far?

 b) How are the materials moved from one station to the next? Do you have an automated or semi-automated
      system?

If your answer to these questions is in the negative you will be incurring unnecessary labor costs, and increase the cost of production minute.

(5) Outsourcing:

When a factory does not have all the equipment necessary to complete production, for processes like printing, embroidery and washing, it has to outsource to another factory.

 a) Do you plan and have a tracking system in the dispatching of the semi finished goods bundle from the production line to the warehouse, and from the warehouse to the truck?

 b) What are the waiting time and the size of the bundle?

If you do not have a reliable system to plan and track garments that you send to the outsource factory, the whole process will take much longer due to missing bundle, over and short shipped, and it will increase your cost without adding anything to the value of your products.

(6) Sewing stage:

The sewing stage is the backbone of the production line.

 a) Do you plan the most effective sewing step of the garment?

 b) Does the manager take into account the skill levels of operation in order to achieve a smooth production line
      without pile-up of semi finished garments in line?

If the line is not properly arranged, there will be pile up of semi finished goods which will slow down the entire production line and it increase the cost of your production minute.

(7) Finishing: 

 a) How frequent would your finished garments misplaced or packed wrongly, and shipped to the wrong destination,
      which lead to costly claims from clients?

 b) How you monitor the folding, assortment pack and shipping process, how often you lost garment in the finishing
      process?

If your answer is negative, you are adding cost in your production minute.

Some advice from Hong Kong Productivity Council

Recently Parellax and HKPC (Hong Kong Productivity Council) held a joint seminar on “How to Improve Clothing Factory Productivity with ERP”. The main theme of the seminar was waste control during the production process. There are seven areas of industry in which resources are frequently wasted:

1. Overproduction
2. Inventory
3. Waiting
4. Transportation
5. Processing
6. Motion
7. Defects
 

But how much of this access and wastage can be monitored manually when your factories keep expanding into remote locations? Since you will not be able to relay on your eye to monitor so many hidden problems in the remote area.

A good monitoring system is important to link every step of the production process and check its cost from the moment the materials are received, all the way to finish garment and cash is received, with an integrated ERP system, all these garment production processes can be logged, tracked and analyzed in real time. They control access and wastage and improve productivity in garment factories.

1. All materials should be checked in with a barcode.
2. They will be located in a specific warehouse rack.
3. Material received from the warehouse for cutting or knitting will be checked in by the time and quantity.
4. Semi finish goods will be tracked by RFID tag along the production process.

Learn More:
Production Control
Application of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification in Garment production)
Seminar PPT: How to Improve Clothing Factory's Productivity by Using (Chinese version)
Parellax and HKPC Hold a Seminar at the Dongguan Industry Fair