Simon Jersey Adopt The Fastreact Approach to Planning
The Company
Simon Jersey is an international brand supplying progressive, professional and high quality clothing for people to work in to around 80 countries world wide. Established in 1971 in Accrington, Lancashire Simon Jersey are the industry experts and have an enviable client base that includes Emirates Airline, Sodexho, Carnival UK, Hertz, AVIS, Gala Bingo and Reliance Security.
Simon Jersey is part of Kwintet AG, Europe's leading provider of professional clothing with brands such as Wenaas, Hejco, The Cotton Group, Kansas and Fristads.
The Challenges
“Simon Jersey has a broad product offer and diverse customer base. The nature of these two key facets necessitates a strong procurement strategy” says Chris Claydon-Butler, Managing Director. “Historically the emphasis within the business has been to acquire goods to a consistent standard from “safe” sources and thus not being able to benefit from the changing global market and how best to extract the maximum value for our customers. The strategic aim has been to achieve best price sourcing through improved visibility of primary source utilisation, improve lead-times through pre-booked capacity and supply chain integration and reduce stock levels through the improved sourcing”.
The Solution
The need to have a very effective planning environment along with systems in place to ensure that there is clear visibility of all orders from all suppliers, taking into account customer required dates, any capacity restrictions, material availability and critical path issues.
The planning boards with Fastreact Evolution provide immediate visibility of the status of all orders, allowing the planners to monitor the load that these orders place on each supplier compared to planned capacity. The software also gives Simon Jersey remote supplier collaboration, that is the ability to automatically email suppliers who can then respond quickly and efficiently with updates.
Fastreact has given Simon Jersey the opportunity to improve the management of its suppliers by understanding their available capacity at any point in time and use this information to reduce lead times for delivery. In addition, the new product development process is now managed through Fastreact critical path enabling the business to monitor events more closely and identify quickly when tasks have not been completed or are completed late and the impact this will have on its suppliers to meet the required delivery date.
“Fastreact is giving us increased visibility of our supply chain and the ability to respond quickly and efficiently to issues. We are anticipating that Fastreact will reduce our supply lead times by 40% and that this will have a similar effect on our stock holding. The ability to schedule exceptional demand quickly and have a clear understanding of any additional costs incurred can only be of benefit to our customers and the business in the future”. Colette Parry, Supply Chain Manager.
The Conclusion
Andrew Brown, Managing Director, Fast React Systems comments: “We understand the garment industry at a ground level and have consequently built very flexible planning solutions, which meet the needs of a wide variety of garment businesses. Fastreact has provided Simon Jersey with a solution that presents their high level planning, critical path and material delivery flows in a visual and easy to use format, which is essential when aiming to offer true flexibility and level of customer service necessary to stay competitive in today's business environment."
