Coats Digital announced that leading textile manufacturer, South Asia Textiles Ltd. has drastically reduced its average machine idle time from 380 hours to just 100 hours (74% reduction); improved its OTDP by 15% and reduced capacity planning time from eight hours to two (75% reduction), since its adoption of FastReactPlan in 2023. The solution has enabled the company to make robust business decisions thanks to accurate capacity data, enabling them to benefit from greater flexibility to improve delivery dates and respond quickly to customer change requests. By streamlining critical planning information in a single platform, FastReactPlan has also helped to optimise inventory management and has enabled South Asia Textiles to unlock untapped, additional capacity to drive significant, new business growth.
Headquartered in Pugoda, Sri Lanka, South Asia Textiles, a subsidiary of Hayleys Fabric PLC, is a leading manufacturer and exporter of textiles. The company specialises in producing and delivering a complete range of quality Knitting, Dyeing, Finishing, Printing, Brushing, Sueding and Preshrunk fabric services for leading global brands such as Victoria Secret, Next, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Calvin Klein, Decathlon, Levi’s, Hugo Boss and Adidas. The company employs over 1,400 staff and has the capacity to produce 800,000 kg of quality textiles per month.
Prior to implementing FastReactPlan, South Asia Textiles faced serious production under-utilisation and delivery issues. With vital capacity planning and production information siloed in multiple sources across different departments, the company lacked accurate visibility into capacity availability. This led to incorrect assumptions regarding machine availability, inventory and production time requirements, resulting in costly mistakes that negatively impacted its on-time delivery performance.
“We were challenged by a serious lack of visibility of capacity plans”
Sameera Jayasinghe, Senior Manager Planning, South Asia Textiles Ltd, said: “We were challenged by a serious lack of visibility of capacity plans beyond a three-day window. Our manual planning processes proved exceptionally time consuming, which not only led to slower decision making across all departments, but also meant a lack of order tracking, missed orders and resulted in regular on-time delivery failures.”
The absence of a co-ordinated overview of multiple planning processes and pre-production priorities across departments resulted in communication lapses and a litany of human errors in pre-production priorities which impacted the successful achievement of orders, and sometimes resulted in unnecessary cost consequences.
Following the implementation of FastReactPlan, South Asia Textiles quickly benefited from access to business-critical planning and production information from the same, single, digitised source. The enhanced data visibility consequently fostered closer alignment and seamless collaboration across all levels of the organisation, enabling planners to create accurate Cost-to-Make (CM) quotes based on real-time capacity availability, and greater flexibility to manage more diverse orders and style change requests swiftly.
“FastReactPlan has made a huge difference to our business”
Rohan Goonathilake, Managing Director, South Asia Textiles Ltd, comments: “FastReactPlan has made a huge difference to our business. We can now make timely updates to plans, enabling all teams to adjust their production schedules accordingly – ensuring a smooth workflow at all times. FastReactPlan allows us to confidently take on increased business to fill capacity for all machine types on a long-term basis, and thanks to the data accuracy, we always deliver on time. We have also benefited from the much-improved utilisation of yarn demand and optimised our visibility on buffer stock maintenance, which has resulted in reduced inventory holding costs and greatly improved our cash flow.”
FastReactPlan has drastically reduced South Asia Textiles’ average machine idle time from 380 hours to just 100; improved its OTDP by 15% and helped the company improves its Dye On-time Delivery in Full (OTIF) to consistently above 90%. The solution has also improved production plan finalisation lead times from eight hours to two, enabling planners to focus on optimising customer service and other value added services.
Part of Coats Digital’s core Manufacturing Solution Suite, FastReactPlan is a dynamic, visual production planning and control tool that optimises delivery, efficiency and lead times. Designed and developed specifically for footwear and apparel manufacturers, it helps companies integrate capacity, critical path and materials into an integrated planning system.
“The positive impact of this solution has been felt across all facets of the business”
Rukshan Periyapperuma, Customer Success Manager, Coats Digital said: “We are delighted that South Asia Textiles has realised such significant, tangible benefits within a year of implementing FastReactPlan. The positive impact of this solution has been felt across all facets of the business, underscoring the critical role that accurate, highly visual capacity plans play in the future growth of textile and fashion apparel manufacturers. We very much look forward to continuing our close partnership with South Asia Textiles and supporting its ongoing digitization objectives in the years ahead.”