Turkish company Aster Textiles adopts Coats Digital's FastReactPlan

Coats Digital has announced that one of the world’s most diverse textile and ready-made garment manufacturers, Aster Textiles, has selected Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan solution to digitally transform its manual planning processes by connecting more accurate planning and forecasting data across departments, in a bid to improve efficiencies, optimise its On-Time Delivery Performance (OTDP) and significantly reduce lead times.

Aster Textiles was founded as a family business in 1993, in Istanbul, Turkiye and has grown rapidly to become one of Turkiye’s top 10 exporters of textile and ready-made garments. Still headquartered in Istanbul, Aster operates four large, state-of-the-art production facilities in Turkiye and Serbia which manufacture a wide range of knit and woven fabric clothing for women, men and children, in addition to a leading line of sportswear – to nearly 30 global customer brands across ten countries around the globe. Aster boasts an annual turnover in excess of $100 million and employs over 2,000 staff. All its factories hold Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), Recycled Claim Standard (RCS), and Organic 100 Content Standard (OCS) production certificates.

“Aster Textiles utilises a LEAN production system in every phase of production to maximise productivity. We place great importance on automation across all our factory operations and aim to continuously improve our production system infrastructure in line with the best technological advancements available. On top of Coats Digitals renowned expertise, FastReactPlan simply offered the most optimum scheduling management tool on the market and we expect that this proven technology will ultimately enable us to balance production processes more efficiently and significantly improve our delivery performance so that we have much more time available to focus on other areas of our business growth,” Zumrut Gungor, process development director, Aster Textiles, said.

Part of Coats Digital’s core manufacturing solution suite, Fast React Plan is a dynamic, visual production planning and control tool that optimises delivery, efficiency and lead times. Designed and developed specifically for apparel and footwear manufacturers, it helps companies integrate capacity, critical path and materials into an integrated planning system, the company said in a press release.

"As the volume and distribution of orders increased, it became difficult to control a total of nearly 100 production lines in different locations. Considering the wide variety of models and flexible working arrangements, it was very important to control the capacity, efficiency and OTIF (on time in full) instantly with real-time data. Based on these searches, we decided to move forward with FRP, which offered us the best solution,” Olcay Bilgic, production planning director, Aster Textiles, said.

“We are delighted that Aster Textiles has joined our growing global family of increasingly digitised fashion manufacturing partners. Aster has been fully committed to introducing innovative solutions and advanced industry automation throughout its state-of-the-art production facilities wherever possible, and we are honoured to be helping the company progress its digitisation programme. FastReactPlan will provide greater visibility and one version of the truth for all capacity planning, so that relevant departments can communicate easily to optimise efficiencies and eradicate problems quickly. We look forward to working with Aster to ensure it remains one of the leaders in best practice garment manufacturing across the globe,” Ibrahim Halil Hacikamiloglu, solutions consulting manager, Coats Digital, said.