Source: The Stitch Times

From footwear to fashion, the very nature of the apparel and textiles market is change and efficiency. New global markets and increasingly demanding consumer expectations are forcing companies in each corner of this sector to make the most of every resource at their disposal. Manufacturing and supply chain solutions need to be cost-effective and drive efficiencies that provide management with the ability to maximize productivity across the board.

Business Intelligence provides a solution to textile manufacturers and apparel retailers to obtain business information on globalization, trends, and fashion patents, as well as regional choices in the fiber, textile, and apparel industries.

Whoever has control over retail space has a much better opportunity to reach the consumer. Successful manufacturers can maintain control by providing retailers with the right product presentation to drive consumers into stores or onto websites. If sales are disappointing, they can offer product alternatives to the retailer. When sales are higher than expected, they proactively offer and deliver additional inventory. By identifying trends on the selling floor and reacting immediately, manufacturers can take advantage of situations before their competition has an opportunity to react, providing a welcomed service to retailers. By using BI tools, apparel manufacturers can easily take over the competition.

The secret these manufacturers hold is capturing and analyzing sales information from retail sites, then leveraging that data to drive additional sales. With more affordable technology, apparel manufacturers have experienced an "overload" of selling information to analyze and identify trends in a near real-time environment. This marks an incredible shift of information from retailer to manufacturer. In the past, unless the retailer called its manufacturer's sales representative to place an additional order, inventory was not replenished, and the sales opportunity was missed for both the manufacturer and the retailer.

Traditional apparel enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems were not originally designed to react quickly to customer requests, so they were never capable of leveraging this newfound "wealth of data." At most, they were created to collect, manage, and report transactions at a very basic level and not to provide analytical, trend, or predictive information.

BI enables such organizations to:

  • Gain visibility into their business
  • Acquire and retain profitable customers
  • Reduce costs
  • Optimize the supply chain
  • Increase productivity
  • Monitor performance and detect trends and patterns
  • Perform complex analysis of market movements and future trends

To achieve goals like increasing productivity, reducing costs, quickening delivery times, guaranteeing quality, optimizing manufacturing resources, and, above all, maximizing profits, it becomes essential for management to have accurate and updated information. BI helps effective decision-making for textile and apparel companies.

BI helps get the real insight of their business needs. It provides insight to textile industry to assess competitors strategies, define competitive landscape, discover and access industry trends and target opportunities.


BI helps organizations beat their last results with


  • Transparency and traceability in all business processes
  • Complying with the very specific requirements of textile companies
  • Enhancing the information flow through the various business processes of


    • Production
    • Planning
    • Quality management
    • Sales order management
    • Purchasing
    • Inventory control and finance


Through BI, textile industries take the advantages on ending of textile quotas and inducing producers to race for capturing maximum global share of the world textile markets, uncertainties due to continuing trade disputes, Changing competitive environment and Globalization and improve their:


  • Merchandise Management
  • Vendor Analysis
  • Loss Prevention
  • Ecommerce Analysis
  • Financial Analysis
  • Loss Prevention
  • Category Management
  • Sales and Marketing Analysis
  • Employee Performance Management
  • Customer Analysis and Relationship Marketing


List of some of the Analytical Reports with BI:

  • Customer walk-in analysis
  • Festival sales comparison
  • Brand age analysis
  • Sales performance analysis
  • Shop wise footfall growth
  • Session sell through analysis

Textile manufacturers and apparel retailers can look at BI to improve purchasing, profitability, marketing efforts, inventory and store management, customer service and financial reporting.


Today, systems are built to collect selling information via the sales documents in near real-time. Manufacturers can use affordable technology to monitor the "sell through" information daily and are able to compare the rate of sale to the actual stock position at the retail location. If "stock outs" are occurring, manufacturers can immediately check inventory availability or identify a "like product" for shipment. This creates a partnership with the retailer, alerting them to possible sales losses and offering additional stock for immediate delivery.

Imagine that-instead of making time-consuming inquiries and analyzing potentially inaccurate data in reports-a sales manager can simply click to have real-time information displayed on ugs desktop. In addition, the manager can "drill down" on a web browser menu to identify additional trends in color, size or fabrication that could assist in developing future sales with the retailer at their next sales meeting.


This same data becomes a meaningful key performance indicator (KPI) on individually tailored "dashboard," which he can access directly from the desktop. It can generate relevant reports on an ongoing basis to track sales, supplier shipments, aged inventory and more on a global basis. He can even receive alerts when data is not consistent with acceptable goals-allowing him and other executives to see manufacturing and sales trends before it is too late to respond to them.


Using BI, an executive might note a geographic trend related to a particular garment and adjust inventory shipments accordingly to ensure rapid replenishment on the floor where it is selling well. On a broader scale, applying such information can help a company maximize profit margins across its product lines.


Alerts are particularly useful for identifying manufacturing problems than can lead to distribution bottlenecks and delays. Avoiding such headaches has the ultimate benefit of keeping customers happy at the end of the day. Today, retailers need more than on-time delivery to be satisfied. They expect added value, which offers a competitive advantage to manufacturers who can offer it.


BI provides value through customer self-service to information on demand through the Internet, enabling retailers to check order status, track shipments or place new orders from online catalogs. Sales executives can proactively suggest alternatives to complete customer shipments at full dollar value when a delivery problem is identified. They also can recommend new orders based on previous sales results to help customers, and the manufacturer, maximize profits.


An apparel manufacturer can realize cost saving benefits from BI by reducing the time typically needed to gather and analyze reports and by making faster, more informed decisions. Reacting quickly to problems can eliminate possible charge backs and margin erosion that hurt the bottom line. Today's BI solutions like 1KEY are affordable for small- to mid-sized apparel manufacturers, who can now effectively compete with larger companies to win retail space.


Originally Published in The Stitch Times, October-2010.



About the author:


The author is CEO, MAIA Intelligence Pvt. Ltd. software product company in Business Intelligence (BI). with over 14 years of work experience. He has created leading software brands in niche segments like excise, service tax, export documentation & payroll.