International Woven Apparel Manufacturer, Sumithra Garments, Adopts Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan to Consolidate and Streamline Production Planning Across the Business
FastReactPlan will provide a highly visual, single source of planning information, digitally connecting all departments across the company to mitigate over- and under-capacity bookings, and reduce delivery delays, material costs and idle time
COLOMBO, SRI LANKA and LONDON, UK – January 25, 2023 – Coats Digital is pleased to announce that leading international woven apparel producer, Sumithra Garments (Pvt.) Ltd., has selected Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan to digitally transform its production processes, enabling it to provide complete visibility to planning and production operations for all relevant teams so it can eliminate low efficiencies and under- and over-capacity bookings; improve on-time delivery targets; minimise unnecessary time and material cost overheads, and significantly reduce firefighting on late order change requests.
Founded in 1984, Sri Lankan-headquartered Sumithra Garments (Pvt) Ltd. is a manufacturer and global exporter of woven apparel products, with special expertise in woven bottoms and outerwear. The company boasts a dedicated family of 4,000 employees and four state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities across Sri Lanka.
Sumithra Garments produces 4.5 million garments per annum and has a turnover of over $40 million. It’s international customers include: Prana, Dillard’s, Tom Tailer, Asos, FatFace, Next, Marks & Spencer and Super Dry.
Eshaka Weerasinghe, Deputy General Manager (IT), Sumithra Garments (Pvt.) Ltd. said: “We found that maintaining separate updates on various Excel planning and capacity reports proved both time-consuming and highly inefficient. Inaccurate order information consistently created over- and under bookings which hindered production efficiencies and resulted in higher manufacturing costs, serious delays in production and consequently, late deliveries. Any last-minute change requests to orders also meant a high degree of firefighting across the production and planning teams as we had no single-source capacity overview to inform a quick and reliable solution. We consequently needed a dynamic, digital planning system that would revolutionise our planning and production processes quickly. The features, capabilities and strong reputation of FastReactPlan meant Coats Digital was the obvious partner for us.”
Part of Coats Digital’s core Manufacturing Solution Suite, FastReactPlan is a dynamic, highly visual production planning and control tool that optimises delivery, efficiency and lead times. Designed and developed specifically for footwear and apparel manufacturing plants, it helps companies integrate capacity, critical path, and materials into an integrated planning system.
Eshaka Weerasinghe, Deputy General Manager (IT), Sumithra Garments (Pvt.) Ltd. added: “Sumithra is currently running an Internal ERP to manage its end-to-end apparel manufacturing business. With FastReactPlan onboard, we are looking to enhance our Production/Capacity Planning functions to achieve a proactive, modern-day approach to decision making.
FastReact is a perfectly matched application to align with our existing ERP, so that we can successfully achieve the desired improvements outlined in our digital roadmap. We look forward to improving our production efficiencies and ensuring we achieve speedy order processing every time for the benefit of all our valuable customers and stakeholders.
Charitha Liyanagoda, Sales Manager (Sri Lanka) Coats Digital, said: “We are delighted that Sumithra Garments has chosen Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan to digitally revolutionise it’s planning and production processes. FastReactPlan will enable Sumithra Garments’ planning teams to input key data just once, greatly reducing workloads and human errors to significantly improve the response speed of its planning and production teams – and we look forward to working closely with them to help them realise their digitisation goals so they can take advantage of new opportunities to future-proof their business successfully.”
About Sumithra Garments (Pvt.) Ltd,
Founded in 1984, Sri Lankan headquartered Sumithra Garments (Pvt) Ltd. is a manufacturer and global exporter of woven apparel products, with special expertise in woven bottoms and outerwear. The company boasts a dedicated family of 4,000 employees and four state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities across Sri Lanka. Sumithra Garments produces 4.5 million garments per annum and has a turnover of over $40 million. It’s international customers include: Prana, Dillard’s, Tom Tailer, Asos, FatFace, Next, Marks & Spencer and Super Dry.
About Coats Digital
Coats Digital is the leading digital transformation partner for the fashion supply chain, powering sustainable processes and high value insights through connected technologies. We leverage deep industry and technology expertise to help brands and manufacturers optimise, connect and accelerate business critical processes from design and development to method-time-cost optimisation, production planning and control, fabric optimisation and shop floor execution. Used in over 3,000 factories globally, our unmatched end-to-end apparel, footwear and textile software and SaaS solutions improve agility, speed to market, efficiency, transparency and sustainability. Coats Digital – transform with intelligence. coatsdigital.com
Coats Digital is the software business of Coats Group, the world’s leading industrial thread company and a trusted industry player.
About FastReactPlan
Part of Coats Digital’s Manufacturer Suite, FastReactPlan is a dynamic, highly visual production planning and control tool to optimise delivery, efficiency, and lead time. FastReactPlan brings together capacity, critical path, and materials into a single, integrated, dynamic planning system.
The highly visual and flexible ‘drag and drop’ approach to planning allows effective master planning across multiple factories, as well as the detailed and accurate scheduling of manufacturing lines/ machines. Critical pre-production activities (e.g., samples and approvals), and material requirements are dynamically driven in a LEAN pull system based on the latest plan, which supports the reduction of inventory and lead time.
FastReactPlan is typically interfaced with other business systems (e.g., ERP, PLM, inventory & shop floor). Sharing key data reduces data entry workload, improves accuracy and speeds up the planning process and response times.
Developed specifically for fashion manufacturers of all sizes, FastReactPlan is quick to implement, configured to reflect industry best-practices and specific business requirements. It is proven to deliver significant and measurable improvements in speed, flexibility, and efficiency. For more information, please visit: www.coatsdigital.com
