In an era where digital transformation is reshaping the textile industry, Coats Digital stands at the forefront, offering solutions that extend far beyond traditional production planning. Today, we are joined by Mr. Kunal Kapur, Managing Director of Coats Digital, to explore how the company’s award-winning stable of digital solutions is driving efficiency, sustainability, and growth across the global fashion supply chain. Mr. Kapur shares valuable insights on how Coats Digital’s tools empower manufacturers to remain agile and competitive, overcome market challenges, and ensure sustainability within their operations.
How does Coats Digital’s strategy for digital transformation extend beyond just production planning software?
Coats Digital’s digital transformation strategy goes beyond production planning software by providing comprehensive solutions that integrate and optimise various aspects of the textile manufacturing process.
Our goal is to quickly establish a valued roster of superior, connected solutions that provide the real-time data insights and transparency that the fashion supply chain increasingly needs to deliver real growth, more efficient operations and meaningful sustainable practices across all its global concerns.
Our market-leading solutions support design and development; fabric optimisation; method-time-cost optimisation, production planning and control, and shopfloor execution. These solutions continue to deliver significant ROI to our customers and ensure that their business processes are robust, enabling them to adapt and withstand any market dynamics that evolve in the future.
Coats Digital’s Solutions for Textile Manufacturing
Our customer success is paramount. We are successfully helping our customers streamline their labour costing and buying processes with GSDCost; enhance their fabric utilisation effectively with FastReactFabric, and optimise production planning and scheduling with FastReactPlan. These solutions have significantly helped to standardise and digitize processes, reduce inefficiencies, and improve collaboration across departments.
By leveraging these specialised solutions, Coats Digital ensures that manufacturers can achieve higher efficiency, better cost control, and greater overall performance. This holistic approach supports transparency, sustainability, and agility, enabling manufacturers to adapt quickly to market changes and meet customer demands more effectively.
How do Coats Digital’s solutions enable textile manufacturers to stay agile in the fast-paced fashion industry?
Coats Digital’s solutions offer real-time insights and analytics, enabling manufacturers to make informed decisions swiftly. This adaptability is crucial for responding to fast-changing market trends and consumer demands. By integrating these tools, manufacturers can enhance their operational flexibility, streamline processes, and improve overall efficiency, making them more responsive and competitive in a notoriously dynamic industry landscape.
In terms of systems, many garment manufacturers face the major challenge of disjointed systems and far too many gaps in the process, that are currently filled by manual documents such as Excel and emails etc. This makes it exceptionally difficult to effectively cope with changing consumer demands as well as a slew of stringent new EU and US regulations coming into force. The only way to achieve true speed and efficiency is to eliminate this manual disconnect from the business process and ensure proper procedures are in place that provide true visibility and greater collaboration across departments.
Adaptive Solutions for Efficient, Sustainable Fashion Manufacturing
Our solutions help the fashion industry achieve this. FastReactPlan, for example, enhances production planning and scheduling to enable supply chain vendors to quickly adjust to changes in demand and production requirements. Our GSDCost solution standardises material and labour costing to ensure accurate and consistent cost predictions that reduce waste, improve production efficiencies and improve on-time delivery performance; And our FastReactFabric solution significantly optimises fabric usage whilst reducing waste and costs to ensure that our customers can manage one of their most expensive resources efficiently and cost-effectively.
Together, these solutions provide real-time data and insights, improve decision-making processes, and enhance overall operational flexibility, allowing manufacturers to respond rapidly to market trends and customer needs.
In what ways does FastReactPlan provide unique advantages to textile manufacturers compared to general planning tools?
FastReactPlan has been developed specifically for the needs of apparel and textile manufacturers, providing industry-specific best practices and advanced algorithms for optimised production scheduling and capacity planning that a general ERP solution cannot offer without significantly eating into a manufacturer’s margins.
FastReactPlan’s visual planning board provides a comprehensive overview of production schedules, enabling better resource allocation and minimising bottlenecks. Its integration capabilities with other systems ensure seamless data flow and enhance overall operational efficiency.
Real-time data updates allow manufacturers to make quick, informed decisions and adapt to changes swiftly. These features make FastReactPlan a powerful tool for improving efficiency, reducing lead times, and enhancing on-time delivery performance, which sets it apart from other, more general planning tools.
How does Coats Digital’s solutions ultimately lead to increased profitability in the textile sector?
Collectively, our solutions streamline various aspects of the manufacturing process, saving significant time by automating and optimising production planning, labour costing, and fabric usage. They also improve inventory management through enhanced visibility and control, reducing excess inventory and storage costs.
These efficiencies translate into substantial cost savings and increased profitability, allowing manufacturers to invest in other strategic areas, whilst improving their bottom line. By leveraging our comprehensive suite of solutions, textile manufacturers can build more resilient, agile, and sustainable operations, ensuring long-term success in an increasingly competitive and dynamic market.
As an example, our production planning software, FastReactPlan, supports a faster, more reliable order confirmation process and production plan which is optimised for delivery, efficiency and speed. Our customers are generally realising a reduction in lead times of up to 30%, improvements in OTDP between 10-30%, and around a 10% increase in productivity – simply by implementing this one business-critical solution.
In a similar vein, our unique market offering, FastReactFabric, enables fashion manufacturers to significantly reduce fabric costs by up to 2.5%; shrink fabric buying and planning times by 90%, and provide 100% fabric tracking, in order to further advance sustainability credentials and reduce overall fabric remnants that so often end up in landfill.
GSDCost: Setting the Standard for Fair, Efficient Fashion Production
Our GSDCost solution remains the de-facto international standard for establishing accurate method-time-cost benchmarks. Our cloud-based solution not only improves the accuracy and speed of costing and sourcing processes, it also improves communication and transparency between brands and vendors, reduces costs, enhances agility and enables both brands and fashion manufacturers to make informed decisions together to ensure a more equitable partnership in garment production and fairer wages for fashion industry workers. Typically, GSDCost is reducing our customers’ Standard-Minute-Values (SMVs/SAMs) by 5%; increasing productivity efficiencies by 5%; and improving on-time delivery performance (OTDP) by 10%.
What are some of the exciting technological advancements Coats Digital is pursuing to further optimize textile production?
Coats Digital is pursuing several exciting technological advancements to further optimise textile production, including the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to enhance predictive analytics and decision-making capabilities.
We are also focused on continuing to build intuitive, web experiences that anyone in the business can understand and leverage, as well as adding integrations between robust, best-of-breed apparel tools so that we consistently build out a better connected digital factory as part of the Coats Digital Platform.
How do your cloud-based solutions utilise data analytics to empower textile manufacturers?
The development of cloud-based solutions ensures scalability and accessibility, allowing manufacturers to manage operations from anywhere with real-time data updates. This means our solutions have access to more data analytics than ever before, elevating the insights we can give to customers.
Coats Digital’s cloud-based solutions leverage those data analytics to empower textile manufacturers by providing real-time insights and advanced analytics capabilities. These solutions collect and analyse data from various production stages, enabling manufacturers to monitor performance, identify inefficiencies, and make data-driven decisions.
Predictive analytics helps in forecasting demand, optimising inventory levels, and planning production schedules more effectively. By offering a centralised platform accessible from anywhere, Coats Digital’s cloud-based solutions facilitate seamless collaboration and information sharing across departments and locations and enable smaller players to digitize their processes effectively without the need for expensive, upfront Capex investment. This enhances transparency, improves decision-making speed, and ensures manufacturers can quickly adapt to changes in market conditions or production requirements, ultimately optimising operations and reducing costs.
AI & Analytics: Driving Smarter, Sustainable Textile Operations
Artificial intelligence helps us identify patterns and trends, enabling more accurate forecasting and efficient resource allocation. These innovations, powered by data analytics, promote eco-friendly practices throughout the supply chain, contributing to a more sustainable textile industry with a reduced environmental impact.
Can you discuss how Coats Digital’s platform enhances collaboration within the textile supply chain?
Coats Digital’s platform enhances collaboration within the textile supply chain by providing integrated solutions that connect various stakeholders and streamline communication. Tools like FastReactPlan and GSDCost enable better alignment between production schedules and supply chain partners, ensuring timely deliveries and efficient resource utilisation.
In a nutshell, our FastReactPlan, GSDCost and FastReactFabric solutions digitize and validate a manufacturer’s cutting and sewing operations to provide a significant level of accountability and transparency for the benefit of customers and all stakeholders alike. GSDCost provides accurate sewing data to plan with; FastReactFabric does the same with fabric cutting and FastReactPlan brings this all together to create an end-to-end planning process.
Our real-time data sharing capabilities enhance transparency, allowing for proactive problem-solving and more effective decision-making. This integrated approach fosters a collaborative environment, driving continuous improvement and innovation across the supply chain. By improving operational efficiency and strengthening relationships between brands, manufacturers, and suppliers, Coats Digital’s platform ultimately ensures a more resilient and agile supply chain.
Looking forward, what are the primary areas of focus for Coats Digital’s ongoing development in the textile industry?
Coats Digital’s primary areas of focus for ongoing development in the textile industry include enhancing sustainability, integrating advanced technologies, and improving supply chain transparency. The company is committed to developing solutions that reduce environmental impact and promote sustainable practices throughout the supply chain.
This includes optimising resource utilisation, minimising waste, and supporting fair labour practices. Coats Digital is also focused on integrating cutting-edge technologies such as AI, machine learning, and advanced data analytics to enhance predictive capabilities and decision-making processes. The improvement of supply chain transparency and greater cross-industry collaboration remain two key priorities for us. By addressing these areas, Coats Digital aims to drive continuous improvement and innovation, ensuring that the textile industry can meet evolving market demands effectively.
Sustainability is also one of Coats Digital’s core values. Every solution we build and engineer incorporates some features that improve sustainability in some way or other. We have introduced a Fair Wage Tool by partnering with the Fair Wage Network, for example, to improve fair wage calculations in labour costings. AI is also embedded in our FastReactFabric solution to help cutting rooms reduce material wastage; And in our VisionPLM solution, we have incorporated carbon impact tracking as part of our product development lifecycle offering.
We are particularly proud of our superlative industry knowledge and expertise. We only hire the most experienced people in the industry who have that rare blend of RMG manufacturing expertise, as well as a technology background. It’s no good simply being able to answer questions about our software. It’s the application of industry know-how that truly sets us apart from the rest. We need to achieve a real impact that helps our customers not just solve their problems, but empower them to be more innovative so they can realise added value benefits as well.
