Six key tips for optimising your entire fashion manufacturing workflow

Manufacturing in fashion – it’s a nightmare, right? If you said yes to that question, you’re in the right place.

While many companies struggle to embed efficient manufacturing processes, there is a blueprint that can help get you started. Read on to find out more!

1.) Ensure designs and specifications are 100% finished before creating a Bill of Materials

The first step to ensuring your manufacturing process goes off without a hitch is tied to finalising product designs and specifications. It’s imperative you get this step right.

Key considerations include fabric types, colours, sizes, and trims. All of these are vital components of the finished product, and getting these wrong will cause problems further down the line.

Once the designs and specifications have been finalised, it’s time to input them into your chosen system. This is a vital step since the information will help generate the Bill of Materials (BOM) and other related documents.

Any changes or miscalculations in the Bill of Materials could have repercussions later, so it is extremely important that this step is followed correctly.

2.) Create a Bill of Materials for each item variant

The Bill of Materials (BOM) is a list of all the components required to manufacture a product. This encompasses fabrics, threads, buttons, zips, and other materials.

To make life easier, it is recommended to create a specific BOM for each item variant. For example, you could create one BOM for a blue t-shirt and a separate one for the same t-shirt in red.

Many companies don’t create BOMs per item variant, but this is troublesome since there are differences in material consumption between each variant.

A larger size, for instance, will require more fabric than a smaller one, while different colours might need separate dye batches.

3.) Place sales orders

With the designs, specifications, and BOMs finalised, it’s time to create a sales order. This effectively initiates the manufacturing process. Once an order is placed, it triggers the production planning phase.

Like the previous steps, it’s critical that sales orders are entered accurately, capturing all relevant details such as product type, quantity, delivery timelines, and specific customer requirements.

With the right system in place, sales order data can be integrated with production planning tools to ensure that the demand is accurately reflected in the upcoming production schedule.

4.) Consolidate sales orders and BOM data to establish production needs

Before manufacturing can actually begin, the production needs must be determined. The best way to achieve this is by using a planning worksheet – a critical tool that consolidates all sales orders and BOM data in one place.

Equipped with this information, manufacturers can visualise and adjust production schedules based on current demand and material availability. From there, Material Requirement Planning (MRP) can take place.

In essence, MRP is the process of calculating the materials needed to meet production demands. Based on the above data, MRP determines what production orders for finished products, and purchase orders for necessary materials, need to be created.

Crucially, this step ensures that the right materials are available at the right time to avoid delays in production… but it is an area where many businesses fall short.

Without access to planning worksheets and MRP, companies struggle to balance the demand from sales orders with the supply of raw materials, leading to inefficient waste management and inventory levels.

5.) Issue the production orders

Now that all the planning has finished, production orders – based on the output from MRP – can be generated. Order details include the specific items to be produced, the quantities required, and the timelines for production.

If you’ve followed this process, each production order will be linked to a specific BOM, ensuring all necessary materials are available for the manufacturing process.

Provided you have a solution to do so, you can now track the progress of each production order to maintain visibility. Examples of monitoring include material consumption, the status of work-in-progress items, and the quality of finished goods.

6.) Delivery

So, your products have been created, that means you’re good to go, right? Wrong!

Before you do anything else, it’s essential you inspect the products to ensure they meet quality standards.

Once the products have passed their final checks, you can package and prepare them for shipping. Efficient logistics planning will ensure that the products are delivered on time to fulfil sales orders.

While this is effectively the end of the process, it is another operational area where many companies miss the mark. They rely on inefficient shipping tools and processes that ultimately eat into their profit margins. Fortunately, solutions exist for these problems…

How K3 Pebblestone can support your manufacturing process

Surprise, surprise! As experts in all things fashion, of course we have a solution to help you with manufacturing. Better yet, that solution supports all of the above and more.

Here’s how:

• Product creation and BOM

K3 Pebblestone offers a simple and easy-to-use matrix grid for creating products in colours, sizes, and second sizes. It also facilitates BOM creation for each variant, ensuring that all your necessary components are accounted for.

• Sales order integration

The solution seamlessly integrates sales orders with production, ensuring that customer demands are accurately reflected in the manufacturing schedule. This helps to optimise production and meet delivery deadlines.

• Planning worksheet and MRP

K3 Pebblestone’s planning worksheet and MRP functionalities enable manufacturers to efficiently manage material requirements and production schedules. By using data from sales orders and BOMs, the solution minimises material shortages and production delays.

• Production order management

The system streamlines the creation and tracking of production orders, ensuring that all necessary materials are available and that production progresses according to plan. This reduces bottlenecks and helps in maintaining consistent product quality.

• Landed cost and cargo management

K3 Pebblestone offers both landed cost and cargo management support. This helps you easily determine your landed cost to ensure optimal profitability, as well as oversee, manage, and distribute cargo to warehouses with simple-to-use features.

As an added bonus, K3 Pebblestone also supports prepacks, which are effectively full boxes of SKUs that can be moved through the supply chain more efficiently. Prepacks can be predefined size breakdowns, assortments, or sets.

Want to know more?

The above features represent just a small sample of what’s possible in K3 Pebblestone.

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you, feel free to contact us today.