Sabina improves capacity planning and pre-production control using FastReactPlan

The challenge

The ever changing needs of the fashion industry, the competitive market and the goal to improve service and delivery, were all key reasons why Sabina needed a solution. In 2008, they bought Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan to help develop their processes, helping the company to focus on enhancing their planning system and that brought overall better processes from upstream (raw material), through middle stream (production) to downstream (shipment delivery).

However, by 2012 Sabina faced two new challenges; first, minimum wages across Thailand increased by 40%, and then by another 30% in the upcountry provinces the following year pushing up production costs. Secondly, the increasing proportion of their own brand sales meant an increase in workload for material sourcing and product development teams.

The solution

Sabina asked Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan Thailand team to review their process and offer suggestions on how FastReactPlan could help with the latest challenges that they faced. A continuous improvement project was launched to provide Sabina with the latest FastReactPlan Critical Path tools, full interfaces with their in-house ERP system and a report designer to speed up communication reducing the reliance on email, telephone and spreadsheets.

Khun Vachirawan Yamsri, Production Director at Sabina commented “FastReactPlan enables our planners to highlight overloads and balance group capacity so we can offer realistic shipment dates to the merchandising team and clients when they first place their order. This has helped us to reduce fire-fighting, late hours and any weekend work. We have been able to reduce overtime costs by 30% .”

Khun Vachirawan Yamsri added: “The software solution has also helped us to foresee any potential problems in the forward plan, allowing us to solve any issues by adjusting the plan in advance to minimise fire-fighting, i.e. if there is a possible issue from a knock-on effect like material delay or lab dip approval, FastReactPlan’s transparency allows management to clearly see the issue, analyse it and make a final decision quickly. It has also helped us to reduce frequency of production meetings from every week to 1 every 3 weeks.”

Miss Haruethai Phalaseem, Business Development Manager at FastReactPlan concludes “Sabina’s strong project team have worked alongside our own team to integrate the FastReactPlan system into their whole business process. The merchandising and purchasing teams update the important Critical Path activities within their in-house ERP system, which in turn imports daily to FastReactPlan. The remote factories also update the latest production status into the FastReactPlan system. The planners are now able to see the whole story, and in turn make a better and more accurate plan. As part of the project, we have also worked on KPI measurements through a monthly review to help Sabina’s continuous improvement program. Their performance to plan is more accurate, now averaging 85-90%. This means they are far fewer last minutes surprises and the whole team more confident with the plan and report they receive.”

Khun Tayakorn Singtong, Planner at Sabina also reported that “Now all the key information is in FastReactPlan, it’s very easy to generate reports and this has saved me a lot of time; production meeting reports now take 1 hour a week rather than from 4 hours a week.”