The actual cost of poor quality can be staggering.
Brands and apparel manufacturers grapple with quality issues due to human errors under extremely tight deadlines. They also suffer from not having the right tools to help Quality Controllers (QCs) perform audits and systematically improve results.
With the right quality management system, fashion brands and manufacturers can ensure the maintenance of quality – improving processes, reducing waste, lowering costs, and increasing productivity by eliminating manual, repetitive tasks.
The Challenge Faced by MAS Direct
MAS Direct is a $50 Million trading office based in Sri Lanka, working with over a dozen brands and contracting to over 15 vendors in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
The company was challenged by the use of traditional, manual quality control and audit processes. They had 10 QCs and wanted to change how quality inspections were conducted at factories. Audits were recorded manually without an IT systems’ involvement. The biggest challenge was the final report generation, which could take more than three days to complete.
Audits were done under pressure from the customer and the factory to speed up the process in order to proceed with scheduled shipments. The senior management also lacked visibility into quality-related matrices of vendors and quality inspector performance.
The Solution: Digitizing the Quality Control Process
To address these challenges, MAS Direct implemented Rizing’s Q² Fashion Quality Management Solution™.
This provided their team of Quality Managers and Quality Inspectors with real-time visibility into quality control processes. The application eliminated manual document and record keeping by optimizing the whole procedure. It ensures easy defect entry with the ability to add comments and capture images as visual evidence and maintains a single record of the whole process for review and revisions.
Inspectors use a native iPad app to capture defects via the device camera and measurement values using text recognition of hand-written measurements. This improved productivity of Quality Inspectors, eliminated manual, cumbersome paper and spreadsheet-based methods, and improved record management. Quality managers, through a web application (built on SAP Fiori), can view POs that are ready for inspection and assign tickets to QC inspectors.
Quality Inspectors can launch the iPad App to view tickets assigned to them and start the QC process. The native iPad app works online and offline and allows speech to text recognition.
The solution eliminates manual documentation and record-keeping by digitizing the process and maintains a single record of the audit for review and revisions.
Another key win for MAS Direct’s Quality Team is the instant report generation feature of the solution. This process used to take additional time, but is now automated. The report is generated at the click of a button.
The solution is improving visibility and efficiency across the QC process at MAS Direct. Dashboard-based reporting provides the management with intelligence on vendors’ quality-related performance data and Quality Inspectors’ capabilities, allowing continuous improvement of the entire operation.
Overall, meaningful data insights show Supply Chain Heads vendor and Quality Inspector performance metrics.
Digital Transformation in Supply Chain’s Quality Control
Traditional quality management processes create inconsistencies in product quality, creating a domino effect throughout the supply chain.
Quality should not be relegated to the sidelines or viewed as an expense rather than an investment. Buyers and retailers aren’t interested in garments that don’t meet their quality standards.
Now more than ever, supply chain disruptions are profoundly impacting the global fashion economy. How are you responding?