Chinese Fashion Powerhouse, High Fashion, Reduces Order Confirmation Time by 50%, Improves Planning Efficiency by 10% and Boosts Production Efficiency by 5-10% with Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan

The adoption of FastReactPlan has transformed planning processes and streamlined data visibility, enabling High Fashion to also optimise its on-time delivery performance, reduce overtime costs and respond faster to more complex customer orders.

HONG KONG, CHINA and LONDON, UK – 15 May 2024 – Coats Digital is delighted to announce that following the implementation of Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan, vertically-integrated, Chinese fashion manufacturer, High Fashion/Dali China Limited, has drastically reduced the time it takes to confirm customer orders by 50 percent; improved overall capacity planning efficiencies by 10 percent; and boosted its production line efficiencies by 5-10 percent (depending on the product). An integral part of High Fashion’s digital transformation program, FastReactPlan has additionally enabled the company to optimise its on-time delivery performance (OTDP); greatly reduce production overtime hours and enable it to respond more confidently and quickly to diverse and complex order requests.

Established in 1978 and headquartered in Hong Kong, High Fashion has been listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 1992. The fashion silk specialist has gradually expanded its multi-national business to cover all elements of the fashion supply chain, including fashion design, textile manufacture, printing & dyeing, garment production, retail and wholesale. The company employs over 2,600 people and has sales and marketing offices in the US and Europe along with production facilities in China and across South-East Asia. Producing between 4-5 million high-quality garment pieces per annum, High Fashion has recently expanded its focus on silk and woven cut & sewn sweaters for the high-end global retail market to include sportswear, activewear and athleisure clothes.

Prior to implementing FastReactPlan, High Fashion faced significant challenges due to a rapidly changing global industry landscape and more demanding customer expectations. With all its vital capacity planning and production information siloed across different departments, the company lacked the accurate visibility into capacity availability it needed to respond quickly and effectively to new demands for smaller, more complex orders or higher efficiency expectations regarding productivity outputs and production costs.

Jinlan Ding, Master Planner, High Fashion/Dali China Limited, said: “A few years ago, we collected capacity and configuration data in Excel spreadsheets from each business unit to generate our Cost-to-Make (CM) quotes for each product. We also relied on this data to plan and schedule our production lines. Not only was this process exceptionally time-consuming for our capacity planners, but we also found it difficult to accommodate change requests related to quantity, color, style variations, or new delivery date expectations on the production floor.”

Due to a lack of real-time capacity and planning data to work from and incorrect assumptions regarding machine availability, inventory and production time requirements, the planning teams at High Fashion found that there were often significant errors in the production plan which resulted in lost orders, poor delivery performance and unnecessary overtime or outsourcing costs.

Miaofeng Que, IT Director, High Fashion/Dali China Limited, adds: “Because of under- or over-utilisation of machines and production lines, we sometimes didn’t have the capacity visibility or flexibility we needed to confidently meet peak season order demands, resulting in lost business, costly overtime hours and unnecessary firefighting on the factory floor.”

Following the implementation of FastReactPlan, High Fashion quickly benefited from access to business-critical real-time planning and production information from the same, single, digitized source. The enhanced data visibility consequently fostered closer alignment and seamless collaboration across all levels of the organisation, enabling planners to create accurate Cost-to-Make (CM) quotes based on actual capacity availability, and greater flexibility to manage more diverse orders and style change requests quickly.

Kathy Zheng, General Manager, High Fashion, explains: “Due to rapid changes across the whole fashion industry, we needed a strong technical partner that could help us digitally transform our entire business. Changes to order requests have significantly increased over the past few years – demanding prompt adjustments in capacity and production line planning and a total alignment between merchandising, purchasing and production departments. FastReactPlan has helped us achieve this by not only optimising our planning efficiencies but also by providing single-source visualisation of the whole production line so that each department can work in synergy to achieve the seamless and precise management of the entire production process.”

Miaofeng Que, IT Director, High Fashion/Dali China Limited, comments: “With the help of FastReactPlan, we have significantly improved our planning efficiency by 10 percent and also increased our production efficiency by 5 to 10 percent by successfully aligning and scheduling garments with similar sewing requirements to the same production lines. At the same time, FastReactPlan gives us the overarching visibility we need to foresee potential problems way in advance so that we have more time to solve any challenges rather than wait until the last moment.“

Jinlan Ding, Master Planner, High Fashion/Dali China Limited, adds: “Since we adopted FastReactPlan, we have seen a smoother communication process between relevant departments. The automatically generated KPI reports sent to each designated colleague on a regular basis have greatly reduced the need for frequent and lengthy meetings. In fact, we now require just one production line-level planner rather than two. Overall, FastReactPlan has enabled us to slash the time it takes to get order confirmations over to customers by a staggering 50 percent.

FastReactPlan has consolidated the organisation’s capacity and scheduling plans into one easily accessible and highly visual platform which has enabled all relevant teams to see the production qualities and capacity availability of each factory more intuitively. Having access to real-time planning data across the business has revolutionised its operations, empowering faster decision-making and enhancing customer satisfaction.

Kathy Zheng, General Manager, of High Fashion, concludes: “We did not just look for a robust planning and scheduling solution, we also wanted a long-term digitization partner that could help us create a fully transparent digital supply chain. The most important element of our digital journey lay in the transformation of the whole company. The technical expertise and support that Coats Digital has delivered has been second to none. The Coats Digital team has helped us to successfully navigate the necessary change required to modify our entire business processes along with the way our employees think and act, and we are extremely thankful for its tireless efforts to get us to exactly where we need to be to confidently embrace the future.”

Part of Coats Digital’s core Manufacturing Solution Suite, FastReactPlan is a dynamic, visual production planning and control tool that optimises delivery, efficiency and lead times. Designed and developed specifically for footwear and apparel manufacturers, it helps companies integrate capacity, critical path and materials into an integrated planning system.

Boris Lu, Customer Success Manager, at Coats Digital said: “We are thrilled that Coats Digital has successfully played such an important role in the digital transformation of High Fashion’s business processes. High Fashion is one of the premier fashion companies in Hong Kong, and we are delighted that it is continuing to enjoy such fantastic results since its adoption of FastReactPlan. The solution has positively impacted all areas of the business and we very much look forward to supporting High Fashion to continue to drive efficiencies, profitability and best practices as it pushes the boundaries of innovation on their journey towards manufacturing excellence.”

About High Fashion
Established in 1978 and headquartered in Hong Kong, High Fashion has been listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 1992. The fashion silk specialist has gradually expanded its multi-national business to include all elements of the fashion supply chain such as: fashion design, textile manufacture, printing & dyeing, garment production, retail and wholesale. The company employs over 2,600 people and has sales and marketing offices in the US and Europe along with production facilities in China and across South East Asia. Producing between 4-5 million high-quality garment pieces per annum, High Fashion has recently expanded its focus on silk and woven cut & sewn sweaters for the high-end global retail market to include sportswear, activewear and athleisure.

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 optimization, 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. Coats Digital is the software business of Coats Group, the world’s leading industrial thread company and a trusted industry player.