Production Planning: Made Easy (Stitchworld Sept 2005)
In the current and future Apparel environment, with huge pressures on lead time reductions, which can only continue and get worse, a fully integrated planning system, which addresses the key areas of capacity, raw materials and critical path could be considered an 'Essential Tool for Survival'.
Stitchworld Magazine September 2005
Planning may be defined as "scheduling something to be adhered to". The ever changing schedule of our activities is testimony to the dynamic nature of apparel business. Our ever busy executives in a typical apparel manufacturing organisation are a reflection of the crisis management situation that arises out of nonadherance to schedule, or the difficulty in creating a realistic schedule and adjusting in line with the problems faced along the way. Some might argue that what's the point of planning in apparel business while any planned schedule can't be followed and needs continuous modification? As staunch followers of production planning, we would say you can't modify unless you have the initial plan and in most cases, if Pareto analysis is applied, you would find that if 80 % of orders are planned correctly and the schedule followed, it will be only the other 20% that need significant replanning.
Prabir Jana, Associate Professor in NIFT, New Delhi is a B.Tech. in Textile Technology and Post Graduate Diploma in Garment Manufacturing Technology. He has authored several articles in national and international journals and is the Technical Advisor of StitchWorld.
Simon Gibson, a BA in Clothing Studies and a GSD practitioner, is the Director of Bangkok-based Fast React Asia (FRA), a joint venture between Fast React UK and himself. FRA has distributors in several Asian countries, including India and China. He has over 20 years of experience in the garment industry.
Production Planning: Made Easy
What are the key elements of production planning for apparel manufacturers? The planning job can be broken down into the following distinct stages:
1. Production capacity planning/ scheduling of the main most critical resource, i.e., Sewing to achieve the customer delivery
2. Production capacity planning/ scheduling of the secondary resources before and after sewing
(e.g. cut, embroidery, washing) in order to satisfy the sewing and buyer delivery schedule.
While planning, we need to also remember one golden rule; at any one time, only one department can be optimised for capacity utilisation. For business reasons some might ask to optimise capacity of a department where a specific investment in high cost capital equipment has been made. But in the Apparel industry it is generally the sewing department which gets highest priority in maximising capacity utilisation. Overall, it is this sewing area as a key driver around which other departments must be managed, where utilisation and efficiency improvements can have greatest overall effect on the business. This means when an organisation achieves full utilisation of sewing resources, then there may be under-utilisation or over-utilisation of it's preceding and/ or succeeding departments. A good level of awareness, coordination and flexibility is the key to managing the supporting departments.
3. Pre-production planning: Often referred to as T&A (Time and Action) or Critical Path and arguably the most important activity involving ensuring the various elements of materials, samples/approvals and documentation are at the right place at the right time to start actual production.
4. Communicating all aspects of the plan to allow those responsible to put it into action
5. Updating actual achievement of T&A pre-production events and production against the plan
6. Revising the plan to take into account over or under achievement against the plan
Why some people are averse to planning is the cumbersome manual work and updating process; instead go digital.
Unlike many computerised solutions, where we say a paper system should exist before implementing a computerised solution, here we would say for any production planning system to work effectively in any garment manufacturing organisation, it has to be digital. For a small business (less than 200 machines) it could through simple spreadsheets but for a business of any size or complexity it should be through a specialised system specifically developed for the Apparel industry.
Only in this way can the different elements, i.e., capacity, critical path, raw materials, etc. be truly integrated and work together.
Data entry can be greatly reduced if there is connectivity between different data sets (a specialised system rather than many separate spreadsheets) and planning rules are applied to calculate daily targets, start, finish dates for each process, T&A targets etc.
Out of the hand-picked companies who claim to use computers for production planning, the majority of them are actually planning the production schedule manually and entering the planned data into computer to record it and easy retrieval for future re-planning.
To realise the benefits, one must fully embrace the concept.
So where can users really reap the benefits of a flexible, computerized production planning package? The answers offer unprecedented opportunities for most businesses:
a) The ability to plan all departments/ subcontractor effectively, taking account of style mix and seeing the effect of the sewing plan on the supporting areas, identifying potential bottlenecks, etc., well in advance, in time to manage these effectively
b) The ability to see the immediate effect of current performance on the forward schedule; i.e., a dynamic plan, updated and adjusted by current achievement
c) To see immediately the "knock on effect" of a change to one order in the plan (change of quantity, delivery, standard minutes, etc.) on all the other orders in the plan; then follow on with rapid "What If " planning to look at alternative solutions and to confirm the best course of corrective action.
d) The ability to see immediately the knock on effect to the plan of a change or slippage in a supporting activity, such as raw materials availability or sample approvals; then again to be able to look at alternatives quickly to plan the best solution
In the current and future Apparel environment, with huge pressures on lead time reductions, which can only continue and get worse, a fully integrated planning system, which addresses the key areas of capacity, raw materials and critical path could be considered an 'Essential Tool for Survival',
