Viet Vuong cuts fabric wastage by 2% and saves 3% in fabric cost with FastReactFabric

The Challenge

Manual fabric assessment processes delivered incorrect data on material consumption, resulting in increased fabric wastage, costly additional fabric orders, and a litany of human errors. With no clear visibility on the cutting-room floor, management also found it difficult and time-consuming to make informed decisions about how to optimise fabric utilisation to reduce dead stock.

Prior to implementing FastReactFabric ( Formerly IntelloCut ), Viet Vuong used Excel spreadsheets to assess and monitor its fabric costing and utilisation processes. This manually executed operation resulted in limited visibility into accurate fabric consumption calculations and unnecessary wastage due to a lack of available data regarding material usage on the production floor.

With no robust method in place to provide an accurate breakdown of fabric wastage, the management team at Viet Vuong found it difficult to make informed business decisions about how much fabric to buy to fulfil orders. If the company purchased more fabric than it needed, it would lose profit from dead stock; and if it bought less than was actually required, it would lose profit by having to buy in more material at its own expense, as these additional costs had not been factored into initial customer quotes.

The Solution

Following the implementation of FastReactFabric, Viet Vuong was afforded the full visibility and tracking of fabric consumption and wastage it needed to make factual data-based decisions about the fabric it purchased and how it was utilised.  By digitising fabric costing and cutting processes, Viet Vuong significantly optimised its fabric utilisation rate to over 98% – reducing its fabric wastage to under 2%.

The solution significantly increased production efficiencies which meant shorter lead times for customers, but also greatly reduced the time and effort planning teams required to create capacity forecasts, freeing up more time to enhance customer satisfaction objectives overall.

Fundamentally, however, the implementation had a direct positive impact on the company’s bottom line, with Viet Vuong reporting fabric savings of nearly 3% and Bill of Materials (BOM) savings of 1.13%, from November 2018 when the solution was first implemented, to 22^nd February 2022.

Coats Digital’s FastReactFabric is designed to give full control over fabric usage in the cutting room by optimising key processes, including: the generation of cut plans, lay plans and allocation, end bit usage, capacity planning/tracking and reporting. The solution’s automated, closed-loop approach to fabric planning reduces the amount of time and effort spent on planning and re-planning and maximises fabric utilisation on the production floor.as first implemented, to 22^nd February 2022.

Adopted by over 150 manufacturers across 15 countries, FastReactFabric is infused with agile analytics and mobile technology that is designed specifically to help manufacturers optimise fabric utilisation and reduce fabric wastage.

Tan Demir, Associate Manager, Coats Digital added “It is great news that Viet Vuong has achieved such significant results since the implementation of FastReactFabric. The solution has not only increased Viet Vuong’s profitability, but also helped it realise a few of its ambitious sustainability targets, by reducing fabric waste and operational costs, which are all factors increasingly become uppermost in the minds of more discerning consumers.”