Following the implementation of Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan in 2023, South Asia Textiles has drastically reduced its average machine idle time from 380 hours to just 100 hours – a 74% reduction.

The company, headquartered Pugoda, Sri Lanka, has also improved its on-time deliveries by 15% and reduced capacity planning time from eight hours to two.

The visual production planning and control tool has enabled the company to make robust business decisions thanks to accurate capacity data, enabling it to benefit from greater flexibility to improve delivery dates and respond quickly to customer requests for changes. FastReactPlan has also helped to optimise inventory management and has enabled South Asia Textiles to unlock untapped, additional capacity to drive significant new business growth.

A subsidiary of Hayleys Fabric, South Asia Textiles carries out knitting, dyeing, finishing, printing, brushing, sueding and preshrinking fabric services for leading global brands such as Victoria Secret, Next, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Calvin Klein, Decathlon, Levi’s, Hugo Boss and Adidas.

The company employs over 1,400 staff and has the capacity to produce 800,000kg of textiles per month.

Prior to implementing FastReactPlan, South Asia Textiles faced serious production under-utilisation and delivery issues. With vital capacity planning and production information siloed in multiple sources across different departments, the company lacked accurate visibility of capacity availability. This led to incorrect assumptions resulting in costly mistakes that negatively impacted its on-time delivery performance.

“We were challenged by a serious lack of visibility of capacity plans beyond a three-day window,” said Sameera Jayasinghe, the company’s senior manager of planning. “Our manual planning processes proved exceptionally time consuming, which not only led to slower decision making across all departments, but also meant a lack of order tracking, missed orders and regular on-time delivery failures.”

Following the implementation of FastReactPlan, South Asia Textiles quickly benefited from access to business-critical planning and production information from the same, single, digitised 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 quotes based on real-time capacity availability, and greater flexibility to manage more diverse orders and style change requests swiftly.

“FastReactPlan has made a huge difference to our business,” said MD Rohan Goonathilake. “We can now make timely updates to plans, enabling all teams to adjust their production schedules accordingly and ensuring a smooth workflow at all times. It is allowing us to confidently take on increased business to fill capacity for all machine types on a long-term basis, and thanks to the data accuracy, we always deliver on time. We have also benefited from the much-improved utilisation of yarn demand and optimised our visibility on buffer stock maintenance, which has resulted in reduced inventory holding costs and greatly improved our cash flow.”

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