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Jackets sell well in Bangalore. It's cool. The hot news comes from apparel retailers who now frequently draw and re-draw their 'hot list'. But as a floor manager recently found, this too can get cold, or freezing, at times.

Fifty pink woolens disappeared within three days, and when a request was placed with the brand owner, it was agonizingly difficult for him to believe that they were gone. The next lot could only reach him after three weeks. Blame unavailability of material, or poor production scheduling. Not to forget, inaccurate forecasting from both the parties. The lesson learnt: the swish of the sexy scarlet skirt and the revealing top can be missed, but not the supply chain visibility!

It's a difficult task nevertheless. Difficult, because the textile sector has been a latecomer, among the last to automate. To a large extent, the problem is to expose it to a technology that initially requires a higher degree of training. Whatever realization there is, stems from the dragon's competition: Indian apparel manufacturers know that if they have to beat China, it has to be in quality, not price. The Indian exporter is now partly convinced that to lure buyers to outsource, and to achieve the 25% growth it wants in the next two years, he needs to be transparent and have better systems in place than his neighboring giant, gifted with capacity.

Apart from the dragon's looming shadow, there is more reason to talk IT. Apparel manufacturers in India have been asked to do more and more of the entire process flow by Western brand owners. Take a peek into the supply chain-there is design, product development, manufacturing, shipping and distribution. Typically, India has always been looked at for manufacturing and the fabric came from another location or country. Now, more and more process is being pushed to India. So, the Indian manufacturer is expected to be doing product development and in some cases, even design.

Where there is a need, there are ways, and then, there are vendors. Even if their market is a little unclear at the moment, at least two prominent names have entered the fray, trying to educate manufacturers on the need to have more and more capabilities to provide value-adds for foreign clients. What they sell is old, perhaps packed brilliantly for local needs: "Applications used by the US over the last few years can be marketed and sold to India because the functions are similar. The challenge will be to maintain good quality," says Vincent Candela, vice president of Fashion Technology at 3i Infotech. His company, the second entrant in the market after SAP, imagines itself as a technology bridge between Western brand owners and their Indian suppliers.

Colorful Palette
The imagination has given way to some realism as 3i managed four customer wins. It is targeting apparel export houses, as well as apparel manufacturers and retailers. Especially those whose product development is still being maintained in Excel spreadsheets or in e-mail. There are new tools to manage all that data, an integrated apparel software solution that takes care of most logistical challenges and is, as these vendors would like us to believe, a competitive weapon to leverage business advantage.

SAP also has a few famed wins, Madura Garments and Arvind Mills being two of its bigger success stories. But as is the case with most other verticals, the SMB space is the place for growth. SAP has announced deployment of mySAP ERP at Alok Industries, a textile manufacturer from Mumbai. 3i has signed up with Garden City Fashions, a mid-sized company in Bangalore. "Mid-sized segment is where the growth is because here, companies are agile and can adapt to new technologies faster. If you look at solutions above ERP, it is primarily meant for companies who have key requirements. Quality audit or production tracking, for example. Before I go into a full fledged ERP, I would like to map my processes into that first. Mid-sized segment is really adaptable to that," says Candela.

The problem perhaps is that there aren't many players in this segment right now. None of the large IT companies has invested in this sector to an extent that they have an apparel domain expert telling you how IT can be mapped. That's because the demands of this particular domain are different from retail or insurance where it is easy to document everything. Fashion has a lot of creative stuff; a lot of things happen on the fly. Configuration of the system, for example, plays a larger role than a straightjacket process. A reason why a large company cannot invest in being that flexible all the time. SAP has attacked this market in the US but results have been mixed. It has some levels of supply chain visibility capability but it doesn't have all. As for the other small vendors, large organizations cannot trust that their entire business can depend on them. 3i says it is attempting to change perceptions by having a few key products-auditing, planning, and tracking-which adapt to processes faster than a huge ERP. And it knows the market size: the Indian apparel industry's two main regions are Delhi NCR and South- Bangalore, Coimbatore and Chennai. In the mid-segment, there are about 4,000 to 5,000 apparel export houses in Delhi and a similar number in the South. Each of these enterprises has a budget of about Rs 20-30 lakh for a solution of 3i's kind.

Playing Smart
SAP's Kind, which Madura Garments implemented, has produced tangible results, CIO NP Singh informs. When he ventured to implement SAP's Foot and Apparel module three years back, there were no other packages available in India. "You had to go for a homegrown application because you have to enter three basic dimensions called 'Master': style, color and size at a grid level," he says. Nowhere could he find a ready-made package that catered to the Master, not even SAP.

SAP also did not have a bar code scanning module. Madura is European Article Numbering (EAN) compliant and so fixes barcodes on each product, which is scanned during inwards or outwards. "We custom developed that scanning module. The complete scanning part interfaces SAP now. It was a major challenge because in our legacy system, operators and shop floor people in warehouse never look back at the terminal. All the product boxes are stacked in a trolley and they scanned in one rapid go. When we developed this module, it used to take three, six, and at times, 10 seconds to scan that bar code," Singh recollects.

The real SAP benefit came with a module called the Internet Transaction Server. Apparel manufacturers have associations with sub contractors. Semi-finished products often go out and come in at various stages-for embroidery or issuing of fabric to a third party, for example. Keeping track of semi-finished goods outside its system, a challenge for any manufacturer, could be solved through this module. Whatever material was issued to the third party, at various stages of production, could be kept track of. The third party could log in and update stage-wise production in the system. "In the legacy environment, this was not available to us," says Singh. SAP also has a quality management module that helps in the inspection of standards versus actuals. So if a fabric is plus or minus the tolerance limit, the material is rejected. This was a manual effort earlier and came with the disadvantage of not having historical data available to measure against.

Give Me More
More automation is what the industry needs, if nothing else, for faster time-to-market. Emerging technologies in this area will take care of much more than this though. Auditing applications is a case in point. In this industry, one needs to audit goods before they leave the factory. Big manufacturers usually send auditors to the factories before the release and the factories also have to do their own inspection. "We provide quality audit on a PDA. This market needs things that are portable. Things like audit and scanning are happening more on PDAs," Candela of 3i says.

In India, PDA is considered a high-value item. 3i is in the process of introducing it as a shop-floor item. "We are saying that if you can get a budget PDA on the shop floor, you will be able to capture information. We want to remove this concept of exclusivity of PDAs and give it to people like quality auditors so that they can fill in information," he adds. RFID will also play a significant part in the company's vision of being a bridge between the US and India. The company doesn't have it in its solution just as yet, but probably will build it into its suite sooner than later.

"Built into" look to be the key words as more and more "trendy" CIOs search for what NP Singh once did: a package that covers the entire value-chain from customer requirement to fulfillment, support and functional processes; a package that is easy to customize, flexible to accommodate future changes, scalable and proven.

Goutam Das

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