Digitization Of Sample Approval Through M-Digital – Sumeet Wishard – VP Overseas And Marketing

The global Pandemic has fuelled the need for digitization, probably expediting the inevitable, most companies are now on a virtual race track, all gunning for the same goal, increased digitization of their value chain. The apparel and fashion industries are no different, as they are probably the worst hit by the pandemic after travel and tourism, but digitization can’t just be achieved with a single central organization making the effort, supply chain partners and their effort to simultaneously digitize their services are absolutely critical and can help pave the way for value chain wide digitization.

Manohar Filaments, as a trims and packaging manufacturer, is a secondary level supplier in the Apparel, Fashion and Retail value chains, but we have made it our mission to pursue large scale and high speed digitization of our services in order to augment and support the efforts being made by our partners all around the world. As a company Manohar Filaments has always lead the way in automation and digitization of processes and services, we had layout automation for care labels, Price Tickets and Stickers rolled out in the year 2010, which allowed for automated creation and approval of said products. Our M-Digital system automated Care & Content label layouts and allowed brand owners to view and approve layouts without waiting for manual creation and submission of the same. This had two fold benefits for the global brands and their primary suppliers the garment manufacturing plants, once the master templates were approved, the brand had no need to review any format unless any legal, organizational or statutory change was required, for the garment manufacturer, it allowed merchandisers to go about their job of placing an order, reviewing the artwork and approving the same in a drastically reduced amount of time, an activity which took days, M-Digital converted to few minutes.

M-Digital, as an application has evolved since then to create a state-of-the-art CRM platform, which allows our partners to review each and every project they develop and design with us, digitally, with entire chronological history of the development and can even track its status, right from the time a query is raised, each and every process step and its final shipment for approval or comments. But beyond product lifecycle management, M-Digital is one of the best applications around, as it provides peace of mind being error free and ease of use as the UX is crafted carefully based on user inputs from our partners all over the world.

During the initial stages of the still ongoing Pandemic we realised that the way our business was conducted will change forever, reduction of cycles time, carbon footprint and cost would become the major drivers, and so, we took a strategic initiative to ensure we are at par or ahead in comparison with other global leaders in the trims and packaging industry. Our pursuit of Digitization allowed us to look at the entire process from the time a Trim is designed to the time it is actually produced and shipped to the garment manufacturer, we then went back to the drawing board and mapped the whole process looking for areas where M-Digital can help our partners, where we saw immediate gains could be made through digitization was the sampling process.

We realized that from the time a designer creates a trim concept, to the time the files are shared with a supplier like Manohar Filaments, then subsequent sampling, then submission and finally approval, improvement or re-sampling, requires a great deal of time and effort, average cycle time for the whole activity ranges between 15 days to 2 months depending on the complexity of the item being designed and approved, samples then travel back and forth across the world, which is not only a cost but also creates a carbon footprint.  

Seeing that there are gains to be made in all aspects, we focused on harnessing the capabilities of our M-Digital application & advanced Designer Skills, to provide a platform which would allow our partners to review and approve trims without ever having to hold them in their hands, unless they want to. Our new Sample development and approval process is a lot less costly and time consuming and has a far reduced carbon footprint than the traditional process.

M-Digital allows for all design files to be uploaded and then our designers create 3-D rendering of the trim concept of 2-D designs, allowing our partners to review the product in all detail virtually, this is followed by the actual development at our part, after which the product is available for virtual review and approval, our design and IT team, ensures the trims can be reviewed from all aspects, which means we ensure the trim developed can be seen in 3-D form, under the correct light sources and can also view functionality videos and test reports, all on the platform. The automation and digitization of the sampling process in Trim industry is going to become the new normal, M-Digital is surely leading the way but world will follow suite we believe.

Through rapid digitization of the sampling process we believe there will be at least 50% reduction in current cycle time for development and approval of trims, and at least 30% reduction in cost incurred in the whole process, not to mention the reduced carbon footprint owing to the fact that actual samples don’t need to travel the world before they can be produced and shipped. This Pandemic demands resilience, agility and speed from top industry players, M-Digital and Manohar Filament’s virtual product development process, allows you to achieve exactly that. Please get in touch with our team to learn more on how you and your organization can benefit from Digitization of sample development process for trims and packaging through M-Digital.