In apparel manufacturing, development of marker becomes increasing difficult with increasing diversity in garment. Consequently material waste in pattern making and cutting increases with under utilisation of fabric. n addition to above impacts, product variety also contributes largely to generation of more sub-standard goods at the end of every process.

Difficulty in Assortment Planning: To achieve maximum impact on consumer's value perception, it is necessary to make all the assortments of a particular product line available on shelf. The availability of complete range of an item necessitates considerable assortment planning at every node of apparel supply chain, starting from initial textile manufacturer. But proliferation of lot sizes deters success of this assortment planning.

As back-end textile manufacturing consists of both batch and continuous processes, it becomes mandatory to move all the assortments of a style together out of final warehouse. To achieve this, it is necessary to harmonise the movement of manufacturing lots in a way that makes the entire component (assortments of a style) available during garment cutting stage.

However, each component has differential processing time, making it difficult to push the entire 'assortment of product' together through the manufacturing leeway of apparel chain. For instance, in an assortment comprises white and color fabric, white products reach final warehouse earlier as processing time for white goods is considerable less than that of color merchandises. And higher the number of product components, more difficult it would become to achieve this synchronization across product-process continuum. The result is that some designs out of entire set of assortments arrive at the garment cutter earlier, leading to assortment breaking. Obviously the final upshot is lost sales due to lack of complete assortment on retail-shelf during purchase.

In apparel manufacturing, a Master Production Schedule (MPS) is always developed to meet the contract delivery dates of the buyers. In many cases, the production orders from the same buyer are grouped together on the production schedule. Those late completed orders contribute to extra transportation costs and reduce selling price of the garments demanded by the buyers to compensate the late delivery.

Poor Asset Management: In internal supply chain, all components needed for a particular product are required to be processed together. With increase number of variety, the time taken for individual component to be processed increases, as lot changeover time and various downtimes related to quality problems increase. This results in higher amount of work-in-process at various stages of operation.

In fibre and yarn dyeing, higher number of changeover from one type of blend to another increases machine downtime. Also time required for matching shades increases with more product variety. Due to capacity constrain of different machine regarding batch size there is more chance of excess dyeing. Waiting time for component shade also increases, as there is more variety to be processed in a given time. All these leads into more material being locked in the process.

In spinning, multiplicity in various blend, count, and twist combination results in more waiting time due to higher number of change-over and insufficient batch quantity of a particular blend-count-twist combination to feed ring-frame.

In weaving and finishing, machine set up time increases with more number of beam-gaiting and more frequency of change in process sequence. Also in finishing, batch preparation time increases with more number of varieties as all similar quality-pattern of a particular product group need to be processed together for uniform finish. All these needs more material in process, which correspondingly increases inventory carrying cost at each stage of processing. All these lead to higher work-in-process.

In warehouse, the finished goods despatch depends on availability of all similar quality of a particular product. In a more diverse product mix, it will take more time for individual quality-pattern to reach in the warehouse. This results in increase in waiting time for balance quality-pattern and higher finished goods inventory.

Way Forward- Recalibrating Supply Chain:

It is evident that a wide spectrum of product variety has impact on operational level of a textile and garment unit. While some of these impacts are resulted due to technological constrains, other are generated by avoidable mix-up, quality problem. But all these lead into failure in delivery commitment and sub-standard quality. While the objective of increasing product mix is to ramp up market share, on the other hand it leads into other operational loss and non-fulfilment of delivery schedule. The later significantly increases manufacturing cost and considerably affects the bottom line. Based on experience, two attempts are mentioned to counter this product proliferation syndrome.