China's Cerie International adopts Coats Digital's FastReactPlan

The company initially chose FastReactPlan to enable it to implement best practice processes and significantly increase capacity at a new production facility in Cambodia, as part of its international expansion programme.

With 29 years of experience in the garment industry, Cerie International Limited is recognised as a leading OEM & ODM garment manufacturing specialist in underwear, activewear and loungewear, and offers services from design and product development to sampling and manufacturing. Headquartered in Hong Kong, Cerie International owns three production sites in China, Vietnam and Cambodia and serves leading brands in the US and Europe.

Prior to implementing FastReactPlan, Cerie International relied on manual processes via Excel, email and telephone calls to co-ordinate and manage its capacity planning programme. With important information siloed in multiple sources, planning proved time-consuming, inaccurate and inefficient. As a result, capacity management and line planning teams lacked the pinpoint accuracy required to respond to a customer change request quickly. With a lack of full visibility of production lines, as well as insufficient data to make business-critical decisions, management and planning teams consequently found that capacity was often over-booked or under-booked, causing late deliveries and unnecessary staff overtime costs.

“Having all the key information in one system instead of many Excel files greatly reduces the workload for our planning teams. It also means that plans are more accurate and that our planners can spend more time optimising production schedules. This has given us greater control over our ex-factory dates and significantly reduced the amount of firefighting we consistently had to undertake. In a nutshell, FastReactPlan supports our business improvement process by providing visibility and coordination that minimises errors and highlights potential problems quickly, so that challenges can be immediately rectified before they become an issue,” Paul Lau, production director, Cerie International, said.

FastReactPlan, standardised PO, colour and delivery level visibility is now available across all departments, establishing one version of the truth throughout the business and a single source of all information for better-informed decision making.

“Despite the ever-increasing pressure for shorter lead times, style complexity and smaller order sizes, FastReactPlan has enabled us to run optimum levels of operational efficiencies and improved our ‘on time delivery’ (OTDP) times by 10 per cent to date,” added Lau.

All departments are now using FastReactPlan to create accurate, real-time reports and daily activity priorities, including KPIs, all of which are readily available for all departments to see.  As a result, Cerie International has slashed its monthly capacity planning and reporting time down from three days to one – a 67 per cent time-saving in updating and adjusting its capacity planning time, the company said in a press release.

“I was involved throughout the whole process of this project from the kick-off until Go-Live. We were greatly impressed at how professional the Coats Digital team were and its international expertise with regards project management and best practice planning processes were second to none. They also provided the ideal combination of excellent guidance and superlative training in Chinese and English,” said GuoFang Shen, planning manager, Cerie International.

“With FastReactPlan, we can plan around problems effortlessly and ensure we create the most effective schedule with just a few drags and drops. FastReactPlan has given us full integration with our ERP system to coordinate plans with the real-time status of available fabrics and materials. This has helped us to identify any potential problems and react quickly. We are also now able to quickly generate reports on any order status and analyse KPI performance on items such as the generation of production planning summaries which can be created within 10 minutes,” explained Shen.

As well as being certified to produce Global Recycle Standard (GRS), Recycled Claim Standard (RCS) and Organic Content Standard (OCS) certified materials, Cerie International’s Cambodia production facility has also been awarded gold label certification from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), as part of its Low Carbon Manufacturing Programme, for its efforts in reducing GreenHouse Gas Emissions across its operations.

“We are delighted that Cerie International has realised significant benefits as a result of adopting FastReactPlan, and that we have been able to help establish robust best practice planning processes across its new facility in Cambodia. The solution has provided greater visibility and one version of the truth for core sewing planning, so that all relevant departments can communicate easily to eradicate problems quickly, and we look forward to working with Cerie to help it achieve its global expansion goals with the support of a resilient digitisation programme,” said Michael Li, project manager, Coats Digital.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (RR)