Lim Line Apparel sees significant productivity and cost benefits by adopting ‘Best Practice’ planning

The challenge

Puvadol added: “I realised that we needed to look at improving the planning and management decision making and get a system in place, so that we did not rely on just two people’s experience and a lot of hard work. This was essential to allow us to cope with both shorter lead times and our growing business.”

The solution

Haruethai Phaleesem, SEA Business Development Manager, Coats Digital commented: “We started working with Lim Line in June 2014. They set up an all new planning team, so we helped them to establish ‘best practice’ planning concepts including the order confirmation process, adjusting output based on style mix, order size learning curves etc. These are all key to a more realistic planned output, accurate delivery promises and capacity booking. To plan accurately, you cannot use pieces and averages. Producing babywear has some specific challenges; there are many safety approval steps and a lot of product sets made up of multiple garments (e.g. hat, bib, gloves, babysuit).

So, we used many of FastReactPlan’s flexible tools such as critical path and product and order sets to be able to track individual garments and sets, as a whole, and manage the Time and Action (T&A) calendars. We also worked with their IT team to integrate FastReactPlan with their Tega ERP system, to reduce the need for manual data entry and improve the speed and accuracy of data.

Finally, we set up KPI monitoring for the senior management team to analyse progress, confirm the benefits of the planning team approach and to identify further improvement areas for action.”

The results

Puvadol Puriteerangkul, Assistant to the Managing Director, Lim Line Apparel commented: “We now think, right from the start, about how to get the best production efficiency…before, our supervisor would usually split big orders to produce in many production lines to run in short period of 2 – 3 weeks, to make sure we could deliver on time. We played safe, because we were unable to manage our line plan, predict output accurately and update the full 3 – 4 month plan quickly.

FastReactPlan has helped us to plan more accurately and has given us the forward visibility to confidently plan and produce a big order in one or two lines and still know that we can deliver on time. This brings huge benefits in terms of production efficiency and quality, as our workers get familiar and skilled at making the product on a longer run. We have significantly increased production efficiency between 10% and 30% on an order by order basis, depending on the order size.”

The conclusion

Puvadol Puriteerangkul, Assistant to the Managing Director, Lim Line Apparel added: “The FastReactPlan system has been easy for the Lim Line business to adopt. My team has enjoyed using FastReactPlan to replace their manual methods. The system, combined with advice from the local Thai team, has helped us to develop and improve our planning process.

We are very satisfied with the results. Now we have the ability to optimise our capacity. Our planning team really have ownership of the plan, and shout out to us quickly when they see challenges with potential underloads /overloads vs. capacity. Our sewing workers are also happy. Before they would work overtime to increase their earnings, but now they can earn the same money in a normal working day through the higher efficiency and their incentive bonus.”

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