Interview with Anuj George Kurian

Anuj George Kurian
Country Head—India
Coats Digital

Our solutions have been able to offer an ROI in six months even for SMEs

Coats Digital is a global provider of specialist, technology-based solutions and industry best practice expertise for the fashion industry. It combines deep industry expertise with the practical application of the latest technology, including big data and AI, delivering market leading software solutions. Its solutions focus on specifically and exclusively delivering significant and measurable cost, speed and productivity improvements to brands, retailers and manufacturers. Anuj George Kurian, Country Head-India, talks about the company's solutions for the textiles and apparel industry.

Tell us about the ERP/PLM solutions that your company offers. In what ways are they unique?

Coats Digital's VisionPLM is a highly intuitive PLM solution for fast, efficient product development and collaboration. From design to delivery, VisionPLM goes beyond the conventional PLM systems, offering core PLM and best in class functionalities. It helps in streamlining and integrating the critical business processes, from design, material, and product development to supplier capacity management and purchase order tracking. Ultimately, it helps in delivering significant speed, efficiency, and collaboration to the value chain. Further, VisionPLM while being exceptional PLM solution, it also is a part of a very powerful end-to-end suite of products for the textiles-apparel-fashion industry.

IT solutions are expensive, and often out of reach for SMEs that make up an overwhelmingly large chunk of the global fashion industry. Do you offer solutions for them as well?

VisionPLM is a modular solution, which means that it integrates with other business systems and is suitable for businesses of all types and sizes. It is also quick to deliver and scale, which means that it grows and evolves with your business. Apart from VisionPLM, we offer GSDCost, FastReactPlan, intelloCut, intelloBuy, and intello3C. These solutions have been implemented in more than 5,000 brands, retailers, buying houses, manufacturing units spread across 65 countries. These solutions cover all the significant problems of time, planning, and material utilisation for the industry. We have seen that the cost of implementation definitely deters adoption of IT solutions by SMEs, but what we have also seen is that our solutions have been able to offer an ROI in six months even for the SMEs which has been the reason for a high adoption rate for our solutions across the globe.

A fast-changing industry also means that the solutions need to stay abreast of the changes. How do you ensure this at your company?

Our parent company, Coats Group, has been the sign of trust, expertise, credibility, and its global footprint for the last 250 years. Coats understood the unprecedented industry pressures and launched Coats Digital replacing Coats Global Services and moving all the software solutions under one unified brand to provide a one-stop-shop and an unrivalled suite of best products. Coats Digital boasts of best industry experts and best development experts who will help in coordinated development and expansion of a suite of progressively integrated solutions.

Could you give us a few case studies of how your solutions have made a difference to companies in the fashion-apparel business?

Radley is a brand that was born in London in 1998. After a period of strong growth when Radley set about reviewing the processes to identify improvements, it understood that it had to replace the existing spreadsheets and manual systems with a single system providing fast access to up to date information. The selection of VisionPLM was natural for Jayne Worden, CFO, Radley as he explains, "Whilst we were quickly comfortable that the functional footprint and highly intuitive nature of VisionPLM would meet our current and future requirements, what was perhaps the most important factor in our decision to partner with Fast React [now part of Coats Digital] was their deep understanding of the industry, and the confidence that they would be able to add considerable value by supporting us through the change management process." VisionPLM achieved the need and became the "single version of the truth" for Radley.

Apart from the above implementations, Coats Digital products like GSDCost, FastReactPlan, intelloCut, and intelloBuy have given tangible benefits on the manufacturing side in the form of efficiency improvement, capacity improvement, reduced quality issues, and better material utilisations. (SG)

Published on: 06/11/2019

DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.