Silken Sewing - FastReactPlan Case Study

Silken Sewing Ltd was established in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2008 and has grown into a successful world class knit garment manufacturer. 600 machines on 26 Sewing Lines offer a production capacity of one million pieces per month.

Their total manpower is 1,900, with a turnover, in 2018, of $19 Million. The Company supply some of the world’s largest retailers including Cotton On, Esprit, and Debenhams. They export to many countries around the world including the UK, Australia, France and Russia.

Production capacity – 1 million pieces per month
1,900 employees
Bangladesh

20 %

Increase in productivity

23 %

Increase in capacity

23 %

Increase in order intake

The challenge

Prior to the installation of FastReactPlan , communication and coordination between merchandising, planning and production was complicated and time consuming.

Multiple spreadsheets and numerous emails were necessary to identify problems in pre-production activities and to understand the production status before the plan could be executed.

The solution

Silken Sewing utilises FastReactPlan’s detailed line level sewing planning boards to manage production capacities, and using the pull system principle, generates T&A target dates based on the production plan.

Rukunuz Zaman, Coats Digital’s Dhaka based Project Manager, explains “The Silken Sewing project team were very active and dedicated. The team accepted FastReactPlan from project kick off and actively explored what more could be achieved. As a result, the implementation was completed within three months”.

The results

Md. Ahsan Habib, Senior Manager (Planning and Supply Chain), said “Planning and coordination has never been easier with FastReactPlan. It now only takes a few hours to create, review progress and adjust the plan. As a result, it has given me the opportunity to focus on aligning all departments to ensure the plan is agreed upon and then achieved.”

“With FastReactPlan’s detailed line level planning board and the ability to consider other production processes, together with clear visibility of the weekly loading, this ensures the sewing demand is achievable. This has resulted in a 5% increase in plan vs. actual.”

“The T&A late and failure analysis provides an insight of the root cause of any issues, which we use to support our continuous improvement. This facility also gave us a tool to negotiate with the buyers when discussing late deliveries attributed to issues within their own control.”
Md. Ahsan Habib, Senior Manager (Planning and Supply Chain)
Silken Sewing

Abdullah Al-Mamun, Factory GM at Silken Sewing, said “It was difficult to get information to manage factory costs before we installed FastReactPlan but now I can get key reports via the software, which provides me with sewing line profitability and other necessary details.”

AFM Towhidul Alam Executive Director adds, “FastReactPlan’s report generation tool has improved management’s time utilisation and we estimate that we have saved 200 man hours per month because our report templates are now created inside the system. With FastReactPlan being able to create an existing financial report, I can assess which buyer is more profitable, which makes sales forecasting easier.”

The conclusion

Executive Director AFM Towhidul Alam, concludes, “before the FastReactPlan implementation, planning was only looking at sewing but now through FastReactPlan, we have been able to monitor other operations’ capacities and T&A status, which results in more accurate and realistic plans for all departments. It only took us 6 months from project kick off to start recognizing benefits through FastReactPlan and in that short space of time we have seen a 4% factory efficiency improvement and we can hold 10% less fabric inventory”

“By using FastReactPlan, we now have established integrated planning through all functional departments. Consequently the feeding between the embellishment units through to sewing has resulted in 25% reduction of non-productive time.”
AFM Towhidul Alam, Executive Director
Silken Sewing