Thai sportswear manufacturer, Pilot Knit Garment, part of the Yong Udom Textile Group has selected Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan solution to digitally transform its manual planning processes by connecting more accurate planning and forecasting data across departments in a bid to improve efficiencies, optimise its On-Time Delivery Performance (OTDP) and significantly reduce lead times.

As part of one of Thailand’s premier textile groups, Yong Udom Textile Group, Pilot Knit Garment was established in 1986 as a specialist sportswear, casualwear and knitwear manufacturer for some of the world’s leading brands including Nike, Converse, Jordan, Erima, O’Neill, Agnes B and Le Coq Sportif, among many others. Headquartered in Samutsakorn, Thailand, Pilot Knit Garment produces 200,000 pieces per month and employs a workforce of over 660.

Ampon Ruayfupan,  MD, Pilot Knit Garment, commented on the selection: “We expect that the adoption of FastReactPlan will prove a real game changer for us. As part of the Yong Udom Textile Group, although we have access to quality knit and dye mills that provide us with premier fabrics, we have still found it difficult to correctly map our fabric plans. With all our capacity and production plans stored in Excel spreadsheets and updated manually, we suffered a lack of clear visibility into capacity availability, unnecessary confusion around fabric requirements and could not plan orders more than a month in advance.”

“As a result, our planning and production teams were constantly firefighting to meet delivery targets, and we were often plagued with under- or over capacity utilisation. Without an accurate real-time picture of our production line’s capacity status, it often took us over two days to create a workable production plan, and it was hugely complicated and time-consuming to implement any last-minute style change requests.”

Part of Coats Digital’s core Manufacturing Solution Suite, Fast React Plan is a dynamic, visual production planning and control tool that optimises delivery, efficiency and lead times. Designed and developed specifically for apparel and footwear manufacturers, it helps companies integrate capacity, critical path and materials into an integrated planning system.

Ampon Ruayfupant, MD, Pilot Knit Garment, commented: "With capacity and production planning playing such a business-critical element of our business, we needed a comprehensive planning tool to streamline our operations, improve efficiencies and provide accurate visibility into the capacity of our production lines so that we could confidently take on new business and plan orders months in advance. FastReactPlan’s unrivalled capabilities in integrating planning processes quickly and providing dynamic, real-time updates made it the ideal choice.”

“We expect the solution will greatly reduce costs by eliminating shipment delays and poor fabric management, and significantly improve production efficiencies due to better balanced production lines.”

Haruethai Phaleesem, Digital Sales Manager, Coats Digital, said: “We are delighted that Pilot Knit has joined our growing global family of newly digitized fashion manufacturing partners. We worked closely with their teams to seamlessly integrate FastReactPlan with their Tega ERP system. FastReactPlan will now provide greater visibility and one version of the truth for all its capacity planning teams, so it can easily optimise efficiencies and eradicate problems swiftly. We look forward to supporting the company’s digitization journey to help it achieve its business goals and quickly capitalise on advanced production methods to maintain its market-leading competitiveness.”

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