Coats Digital has introduced a newly amalgamated buying and cutting solution dubbed “FastReactFabric,” aimed at enabling fashion manufacturers to significantly reduce fabric costs by up to 2.5 percent, shrink fabric buying and planning times by 95 percent and provide 100 percent fabric tracking.
FastReactFabric is meant to further advance sustainability credentials and reduce overall fabric remnants that often end up in landfills. Coats said with FastReactFabric, the apparel industry can reduce the fabric it consumes, which will have a positive impact on the environment while boosting profits.
FastReactFabric combines Coats Digital’s IntelloCut and IntelloBuy solutions into one single platform, providing a closed-loop, continuous 360-degree feedback ecosystem between buying and cutting operations, so that fashion manufacturers can accurately procure and utilize fabric, effectively reducing waste, boosting efficiency and significantly increasing their bottom line.
“We listened carefully to what our customers were saying about the fabric challenges they face, and realized that it made perfect sense to amalgamate and enhance our fabric cutting and buying solutions into one comprehensive single platform to eradicate key pain points in one swoop,” Akash Shah, managing director of Coats Digital, said. “With 70 to 80 percent of fashion manufacturing outlay attributed to fabric costs, the digitization of fabric-related processes is the most fundamental way that apparel manufacturers can make a real difference to their profits, as well as reduce the impact of fabric waste on the planet.”
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Shah said the new fabric solution will prove instrumental in redressing some of the financial damage suffered during the pandemic, while helping the apparel industry future-proof against incoming global legislation around waste and sustainability compliance.
FastReactFabric will increase fabric ultilzation significantly by automating and optimizing the estimation of fabric consumption at the buying stage, together with accurate cut planning and execution on the production floor, to eliminate time-consuming manual tasks and reduce fabric, water and energy consumption. The new offering will ultimately unlock fabric buying and cutting data to deliver meaningful insights that drive confident decision making.
This will allow fashion manufacturers to optimize operations by capitalizing on fact-based buying processes that eliminate redundant stock, make fast data decisions using a 360-degree feedback loop to plan and cut more styles with accuracy and speed, creating precise fabric forecasts that meet demand for increasing colorways and complexity. It will also streamline processes, delivering comprehensive visibility, removing bottlenecks and unifying booking and cutting functionality.
For merchandising teams, FastReactFabric delivers accurate fabric forecasts by applying advanced intelligence to fabric data. These insights help apparel manufacturers to quickly overcome the challenges caused by complex new styles, increasing colorways and shrinking lead times.
For the cutting floor, FastReactFabric uses advanced algorithms to generate optimized cut plans from millions of possible combinations in one click. Manufacturers can gain complete control over their cutting rooms by optimizing key processes such as the generation of cut and lay plans and the allocation of fabric, Coats said.
FastReactFabric aggregates historical, past performance and real-time data from fabric utilization processes so that manufactures can have accurate, up-to-date view of the cutting floor.
“Buying too much fabric is a costly mistake,” Wesley Ekman, senior sales director at Coats Digital, said. “In such a volatile trading environment, fashion manufacturers simply cannot afford to buy the wrong amount of their largest cost investment, if they want to keep up with increasing consumer demand for fashion in a variety of style and color choices. A more streamlined production process using accurate fabric data significantly frees up warehouse and shop floor space, reduces inventory, and enables manufacturers to adapt effectively to increasing garment complexities and colorways, and we expect our new solution will prove a highly compelling proposition to companies looking for a sure-fire remedy to mitigate rising costs fast.”
“Using a production-grade cut plan and floor parameters to derive booking consumption, we have been able to replicate the actual production scenario at the time of booking and reduce 2 percent of our fabric buying expense,” Shajedur Rahman, CEO, of Bangladeh’s Epyllion Group, said. “We are happy to see the continuous improvement in our fabric booking process.”
“We believe the cut module of FastReactFabric is the best solution to manage all cutting processes automatically and systematically,” said Quang Bui Viet, CEO of Song Hong, Vietnam, which produces clothing and bedding. “The solution has greatly helped factories save more fabric, reduce operational lead times and improve both material management and working conditions.”
Coats Digital is the software business of Coats Group, an industrial thread company. Its apparel, footwear and textile specific solutions harness industry best practice and the latest technology to improve agility, speed to market, efficiency, transparency and sustainability.