How Mainstream Sewn-Products Companies Are Cutting Time and Costs with Collaborative Product Commerce (CPC)

The rules of the game have changed for today's fast-paced consumer products companies. Consumers have raised the bar for product innovation by demanding greater product selection and increased product sophistication.

Expanding global competition has increased pressure on costs, fueling the move to decentralize operations. Many companies have become "virtual" enterprises, embracing contracting and outsourcing as answers to meeting these tough challenges.

Given these new rules, the need for faster time-to-market has never been greater. Traditional PDM systems will not do the job and the leap into full-scale CPC (Collaborative Product Commerce) systems is often too extensive and costly for many. The answer may be a step-by-step approach to securing internal collaboration and workflow automation followed by the larger step into supply chain communications.

This document explores the current thinking on CPC and how four sewn products manufacturers have taken the first steps in that direction - reaping the benefits in time and cost savings.

Collaboration: A Competitive Strategy
After trimming operations and cutting costs to bare minimums, many companies are recognizing the need to revitalize their competitive strategies. While keeping costs in close check, many executives are now shifting focus back to increasing top-line revenues. In the fast-paced consumer products market, increased revenue is driven by product innovation.

The rush to globalization has also brought significant changes to the product development process. It's now tougher to keep everyone working from the same page, and to orchestrate the myriad of events that must occur on schedule. Improving the level of collaboration in product development becomes crucial in the faster-to-market model. Until recently, product development has taken place in virtual isolation. Smart companies are now beginning to link internal and external players - retailers, manufacturers, wholesalers, suppliers, customers, and other partners into the product development process in order to minimize time and costs.

It's becoming increasingly clear; fostering collaboration is the only way to stay competitive.

What is CPC?

Imagine designs and other product-related data zipping around the world via the Internet - concepts being presented by a design team in New York, specifications created by product development teams in San Francisco, raw materials sourced by buyers from Asia and the U.S., prototypes assembled by a contractor in Mexico, and approved by the retailer in Chicago - all in the course of days instead of weeks or months.

The business case for improved collaboration is compelling.

Collaborative Product Commerce (CPC) solutions are part of a strategic business approach, along with collaborative business practices, to bring together designers, product developers, engineers, manufacturers, contractors, agents, suppliers, retailers, and other related partners to collaborate on the delivery of innovative products to market.

The Aberdeen Group defines CPC as "a class of software and services that uses Internet technologies to permit individuals - no matter what role they have in the commercialization of a product, no matter what computer-based tools they use, no matter where they are located geographically or within the supply chain - to collaboratively develop, build, and manage products throughout the entire lifecycle."

CPC is a greatly expanded successor to product data management (PDM) tools. CPC not only includes the CAD data management capabilities of PDM, but also expands in scope to include enterprise-wide information and applications. Fully utilized, CPC can act as an enterprise application 'integrator', providing visibility into product data across multiple systems covering design, engineering, product data management (PDM), supply chain management (SCM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP).

CPC Solves Real Problems

The goal of building a collaborative business strategy is to create better products in less time, with greater creativity, lower costs, and fewer errors and defects. CPC solutions provide the computing infrastructure that is required to support this advanced level of collaboration to succeed. CPC solutions can enable information exchanges that are far richer than faxes, emails, conference calls, courier packs, or other traditional forms of communicating information and ideas.

The major benefits of CPC for fast-paced consumer products companies include:

Accelerating time-to-market provides improved customer satisfaction, greater profit potential, and gains in market share.
Expanding product design collaboration to include customers, sourcing and other functional areas keeps the focus on products that customers want and manufacturing can deliver.
Greater agility is achieved by adapting quickly to marketplace changes and by improved management of frequent product changes.
Collaboration in product development yields higher quality products and reduces costly design flaws that add costs that cannot be removed later in the process.
Automatic tracking and notification of key milestones in product development and pre-production processes provides the visibility necessary to staying on schedule and facilitates improved management of multiple layers of suppliers.
Effective data sharing "anytime, anyplace" keeps everyone on the same page, eliminating costly errors and delays.

CPC can bring dramatic changes to the way products are developed and delivered to market. Sharing product information across the enterprise can collapse the time it takes to turn ideas into products. One path to achieving CPC is by taking a step-by-step approach and the first step is to achieve internal collaboration.

Coordinating Internal Communications at Koret

Koret of California, a division of the Kellwood Company, is a San Francisco-based women's wear company founded by Joseph Koret in 1938. A leader in women's casual wear, Koret clothing fits women from their twenties into their senior years. With revenues in excess of $250 million in 1997, Koret is headquartered in the South of Market district of San Francisco and employs over 1000 people worldwide. Its labels include Koret, Nap Valley, Jax and Stephanie K.

In the apparel business, nothing is constant except change. New styles and specifications are routine, and new production sources are discovered and changed. Styles are put into production, pulled from production, and then put back in. To keep within tight production budgets and even tighter scheduling, Koret needed product information management software that tracked the most current specs, informed a worldwide production team of changes and confirmed each team member's receipt of the information.

"Our team had been looking for a tool where we can enter data once and eliminate double and triple entering of data. Up until now, it has been a manual process ridden with paperwork," Susan Unrath, Koret Vice-President and CIO notes. She was pleased when she discovered Justwin Technologies. Justwin allows Koret to integrate their design and manufacturing systems smoothly and seamlessly. "The customization has gone smoothly, and streamlining is going at a rapid pace. You can fine tune it while you're in a pilot phase."

Unrath can now streamline the maintenance of pre-production data even with the many changes the styles go through. Now people put data into the system once, instead of re-entering data with every production change.

The system knows which approvals are required at each stage of production. As styles move through pre-production to the adoption and first-cut stage, it automatically launches e-mail in conjunction with Koret's defined workflow steps when specs change. The user doesn't even have to back out of the application. The easy-to-use, point-and-click interface is being enthusiastically received by users company-wide, according to Unrath.

Faster Response Times for Schwab

Schwab Company is a children's wear company founded by Samuel Schwab in 1914. Today, it manufactures two brands: The Little Me line features fashion apparel for infants to 24 months through 4T sizes. The Ralph Lauren Children's line provides fashions for infant to Boys Size 20 and infant to Girls size 16. This privately held family business has corporate facilities in New York City, Cumberland, MD, and Martinsburg, WV. The New York facility handles sales, design and marketing, and Cumberland handles sourcing, manufacturing, I/T, Little Me distribution and finance and Martinsburg handles Ralph Lauren distribution. Schwab Company currently has 600 employees.

Schwab's success has been due to the fact that they respond quickly to the fast-moving and competitive children’s market. But to stay competitive they needed to speed up their response even more. Specifically, they needed to reduce the time it took to go from concept to finished product. This required better automation and control, centralizing information, and keeping all current data, including style changes, in one place so every team member can easily access that information, as they need it.

A web-enabled collaborative product information management system lets members of the Schwab organization collaborate on the pre-production process wherever they might be in the world. Data can be shared and exchanged in real time, team members can communicate freely, but only among those who are given access to the system where absolute security is maintained.

As Doug Schwab, Vice President, Technology puts it: "We have offices all over the World, not to mention all of our associates who are constantly on the road. With our new CPC system, anyone in the company can put changes on the system and have those changes viewed by anyone else in the company. The entire global enterprise is continually kept up to date and up to speed.”

With their new system, spec changes are communicated to a sourcing office or factory in a timely manner. This reduces production inaccuracies that cost the company money. Only one set of specs is kept in a centralized location that's accessible to everyone who's responsible for the run.

Mr. Schwab adds: "We're also impressed with how we're able to track styles that are in development." Schwab had a full time person dedicated to tracking styles manually on spreadsheet software. Now styles can be tracked automatically through views of the workflow management module. Different views will provide information on where a product is in the development cycle.

These features improve not only accessibility and tracking, but keep data from being lost. For instance, about two years ago, the Cumberland location was flooded along with many of its style packets. The information would now be on the computer and backed up during a normal systems backup. In the event of a disaster, like a flood, the style information would be preserved.

Then there's the very important issue of Quality Control. Because information is easily updated and kept in a single accessible location, a designer can attach a digital photograph of a sample so the factory foreman can visually see how a certain garment should be assembled.

Cutting Time and Costs Down Under for Sportsknit

Sportsknit is a division of the Australian Fashion Group. Other divisions include the House of David, Julie Slade, Interactive Designs and AFG kidswear.

Their new CPC system has provided two major benefits for Sportsknit:

It manages the efficiency of garment design by automating the pre-production stages of clothing manufacturing.
It lets Sportsknit scan clothing sketches for future reference by using LNDI (Lotus Notes Document Imaging). This sketch, with size, measurement and fabric details, is attached to the garment's documentation throughout the design process and is easily accessible to the design team.

Before Sportsknit embarks upon production of a particular style, a design must complete eight pre-production stages. Workflow capabilities have allowed Sportsknit to automate this traditionally slow and manual process. As each stage of the pre-production process nears completion, the system electronically notifies the person responsible for final approval of that particular stage. "Designing and preparing a style for production is an interactive process," said Andre Flamer-Caldera, MIS Manager, Sportsknit. "It involves our various teams juggling numerous balls simultaneously and making important decisions that affect an item's productivity as well as profitability."

These decisions include; which fabrics to choose from, whether its cheaper to manufacture overseas or in Australia, and how changing a single component will affect overall profit margins.

Now Sportsknit can easily compare options against each other in 'what if' scenarios. This ensures the best balance between profitability and style integrity. "It monitors our margins and timeframes electronically, notifying management if a style is in danger of being unprofitable," said Andre Flamer-Caldera. "Time and margins are critical to fashion design- they make the difference between profit and loss. It lets us take action before a manufacturing problem becomes critical. Management can now easily monitor the design process from their desktop, letting them make decisions to improve turn-around times.”

" Our average pre-production cycle for garment design has been reduced from 21 days to 15 and we expect increased sales because of faster response to customer requests," states Ms. Flamer-Caldera.

Collaboration at Work for R.G. Barry

With about 2,000 employees and more than a dozen offices, including global manufacturing and distribution locations, R.G. Barry is the world’s largest manufacturer and marketer of comfort footwear for at- and around-the-home. The Company’s slippers and casual footwear for women, men and children are sold under brand names including Dearfoams®, EZfeet®, Mushrooms® Slippers, Snug Treds® and under the licensed Liz Claiborne® name. The company controls about a 40% share of the U.S. slipper market. Its products also are sold in Canada, Mexico, Europe and South America.

“We have achieved our goal of centralizing all of our pre-production information into one collaborative system,” said Don Van Steyn, R.G. Barry Vice President-CIO. “Prior to implementing our CPC system, we had information in so many different formats and locations that it was difficult for our teams to efficiently work together. Now, with all of our design images, materials information, costing, assembly and packaging instructions in one integrated system, we have created a much more collaborative and smoothly flowing environment.”

“By focusing our initial implementation within a defined workgroup and a specific product line, we were able to accurately track its benefit and ROI. We are now expanding the system to include all involved pre-production associates company wide. We soon will begin utilizing the Web-enabled components of the system to make pertinent information accessible to our locations in Europe, Mexico and China,” he said.

Tommy Bray, R.G. Barry Vice President-Product, added, “We utilize these tools to automatically track and manage the major milestones in our product development process, all the way from concept to MRP. The change really has paid off. We have seen substantial improvement in our time-to-market as a result of the Justwin CPC system. We expect that with full implementation we will reduce our overall cycle time by up to 50%.”

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