Seidensticker, a leading vertically-integrated manufacturer of men’s shirts and women’s blouses, has adopted Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan solution to provide full visibility of its capacity planning.

This is now enabling the company to respond quickly to smaller, more complex order requests and reduce the time and cost challenges involved in meeting last-minute change requirements from customers.

With an annual turnover of $145 million, Seidensticker is a 100% family-run business headquartered in Bielefeld, Germany with Asian headquarters in Hong Kong. It has its own factories in Vietnam, Indonesia and Bangladesh and supports a 2,300-strong workforce across four factories which produce 420,000 Seidensticker-branded garments a month. The company additionally has another five partner factories that provide garments for other brands producing between 550,000 and 800,000 pieces a month.

Seidensticker found that without good key planning and workflow data visibility, capacity management and line planning teams did not have the accurate data they needed to seamlessly manage higher quantities of smaller orders that often required style variations with increased complexity. The company also found it challenging to manage late customer changes to orders since business-critical data was siloed in multiple sources, which meant teams could not work together from a single source of data to respond quickly and effectively.

“We chose FastReactPlan following a strong recommendation from our supply chain department and a highly compelling product presentation from the Coats Digital team,” said Peter Tornow, Seidensticker (Overseas) MD. “With higher basic cost-to-make outgoings and raw material costs industry-wide, as well as increasing requests for faster, shorter and more complex orders, we needed a solution that would provide total visibility to global capacity planning and workflow processes so we could make business-critical decisions quickly and ensure early discovery of potential delivery challenges to enable us to action these fast and effectively.  We expect the implementation of FastReactPlan to significantly improve production efficiencies as well as reduce last-minute firefighting for our planning teams across the whole business.”

www.coats.com