Vogue Tex gain 3% productivity with Coats Digital's FastReactPlan

Vogue Tex (Pvt.) Limited was incorporated as an apparel manufacturer for the global market in Sri Lanka 1991. The business has bloomed over the years and expanded into nine factories, six of which are situated in southern costal belt, two in the North central province and the ‘wet processing’ unit located in suburbs of Colombo.

Vogue Tex mainly caters for European market, supplying for major customers such as Gerry Weber, Esprit, C&A, Tom Tailor, S Oliver, Hugo Boss, Marks and Spencer, Next and Tesco. The company specialise in ladieswear, manufacturing products such as blouses, skirts, dresses, casual jackets & trousers. With a total workforce of 6,912 coupled with 3,390 sewing machines, the business produces 760,000 garments each month.

Production capacity – 760,000 pieces per month
6912 employees
Sri Lanka

12 %

increase in sales

3 %

increase in productivity

The Challenge

Business growth imposed a constant pressure to provide the best quality items to customers, on time, at a lesser cost. The challenge was make a realistic plan and to maintain the plan. Regular day to day changes to the plan due to problems in pre-production were causing capacity losses and having a massive impact on production efficiency.

The Solution

FastReactPlan system has been implemented in order to manage production capacities centrally, including Critical Path Management linked to the production plan to ensure the pre-production preparation supports the production plan.

Kithsiri Hapuhinna, Planning Manager at Vogue Tex added “The FastReactPlan solution sets the perfect ground to establish centralised planning within Vogue Tex. Visual planning board rotations help to ensure that correct product types are allocated to correct production facilities, continuing the same product type, which ultimately helps increase productivity. Daily production updates have enabled us to understand the rhythm of production and deviation from the plan. Time saving is one of the key benefits achieved through FastReactPlan. Now we have time to concentrate and optimise the plan instead of last minute fire fighting.”

“FastReactPlan highlights specific issues well in advance. This helped us to make prompt and accurate business decisions, improved on time material availability and increased Planned Cut Date (PCD) hit rate. Continuous supply to the production floor helped us to increase productivity by 3%, which along with better capacity utilisation has resulted in a 12% increase of sales. We are now exploring additional features of FastReactPlan”
Stephen Samraj,
Director, Vogue Tex

The conclusion

Dimitri Suraweera, Country Manager, Coats Digital commented “Even though companies have invested in ERP systems, so many still rely on spreadsheets, emails and meetings to plan their capacity and coordinate between departments. This is because an ERP system does not handle planning in enough detail by linking capacity, pre-production and actual production status together.”

“Our FastReactPlan solution has been designed to allow businesses to plan ahead, whilst highlighting potential problems well in advance, this leads to improved productivity and avoidance of those unnecessary add-on costs that are a result of difficulties in coordination and control. Most apparel manufacturing businesses will see similar (or more) savings and benefits to what Vogue Tex have reported along with a typical ROI in less than 6 months. This is an exceptional payback period for any software solution.”
Dimitri Suraweera, Country Manager
Fast React (now part of Coats Digital)