Hi-Tech Apparel selects FastReactPlan to support faster, accurate production planning

As the industry emerges from the Covid-19 pandemic, Thailand’s leading garment manufacturer, Hi-Tech Apparel ensures business stability and boosts profitability by digitizing its production planning and control processes with FastReactPlan from Coats Digital.

Coats Digital’s market-leading solution, FastReactPlan will support Hi-Tech with effective master planning across multiple factories, as well as detailed and accurate scheduling of manufacturing lines, providing a firm foundation for a faster, more efficient and agile production and delivery process.

Established in 1991, Hi-Tech Apparel Co Ltd is one of the leading garment manufacturers of Thailand, with production facilities in 10 different locations including cities in Thailand, as well as in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. Hi-Tech manufacture a wide range of sportswear and formal wear and caters to leading brands, including Nike, Target, Warrix Sports and Joe Boxer.

The Hi-Tech team was faced with numerous challenges in their planning process which were having a huge impact on the profitability of their business. There was a lack of a centralised planning mechanism, which meant it was difficult for the team to monitor planning across multiple factories at the same time. Unanticipated issues related to the critical path and material availability meant that the team had to spend a lot of time and effort firefighting, which affected the on-time start of production, delivery performance and increased air freight costs.

Wason Vitanakorn, CEO, Hi-Tech Apparel, said: “The Covid-19 crisis has brought unprecedented changes in the industry which affected our business as well. There is increased uncertainty and a high level of competition in the industry. So it was important for us to carefully prioritise business initiatives that provide firm foundations for a faster, more efficient and agile production and delivery process.

The project at Hi-Tech Apparel will include detailed planning of the sewing factories using FastReactPlan’s highly visual planning board, scheduling and visualisation of load on secondary processes such as cutting and printing, dynamic planning of material requirements (MRP) as well as third party integration to a wide range of in-house business systems.

Kholchapol Chuensawang, Director (IT), Hi-Tech, commented: “Considering the rapidly changing consumer demands and increasing competition in the industry, we realised it was important to take a step forward to streamline and digitize planning, communication and coordination in and across our factories. We found that Coats Digital was the perfect partner to enable us best practice processes and digitization of production planning and control (PPC) through their solution FastReactPlan.

Earlier it was difficult for us to have visibility of planning boards of multiple factories in one place. We’re confident that FastReactPlan will enable fast, detailed and accurate planning and order confirmation process, with informed order allocation and management across our multiple factories.” 

Before FastReactPlan, the Hi-Tech team had to spend a huge amount of time and effort to solve unforeseen problems either related to material availability or pre-production critical path activities. This directly impacted the on-time start of production and the delivery performance.

Kholchapol Chuensawang, Director (IT), Hi-Tech, continued: “The Coats Digital team was very keen to understand our major pain points and developed a good understanding of our business requirements. Coats Digital’s pre-sales team helped us to understand various benefits of FastReactPlan through a detailed demo of the product after which we were confident to choose the product for our company.”

The training will be delivered using the online Learning Management System, a platform launched by Coats Digital to support remote implementation and customer success projects during the worldwide pandemic.

Stephen C. Dodgson, Sales Director – SEA, Coats Digital, said: “For 30 years, Hi-Tech Apparel has successfully met the many and various challenges that are typical to large scale apparel manufacturers. Partnering with global leaders such as NIKE, they are now looking forward to the next stage of development, which includes aggressively developing their roadmap for further digital transformation.

We are delighted to take up the role of a preferred technology partner as they embark on this latest phase of their journey, most immediately implementing FastReactPlan to support their team in the digitization of planning activities. This will increase their agility, accelerate business processes and optimise their production performance, and bring significant improvements in the visibility of operations to the entire management team.”

FastReactPlan is the market-leading production planning solution, designed and developed specifically for apparel and footwear manufacturers and used successfully in over 2,000 factories and 40 countries around the world.