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Monday, 4 September 2017 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Sri Lanka’s leading enterprise solution provider H One last week launched RES.Q | QMS, a quality management solution tailor made to minimise defects in apparel manufacturing.
H One Director Rakhil Hirdaramani speaks at the RES.Q launch on the challenges of the global apparel manufacturing industry and why smart solutions are so critical moving forward
H One’s solution draws on the rich heritage of expertise provided by its parent company, the Hirdaramani Group, a 120-year-old apparel powerhouse in Sri Lanka.
RES.Q | QMS is a cloud-based IT solution that provides decision-makers with a 360° view of factory floor production quality. It uses data analytics to improve production quality, eliminates reporting time lags, enables faster and more accurate decision-making, and reduces wastage. It can be used by anyone with minimal training, and easily adapted by apparel manufacturing businesses of any size - small, medium or large.
RES.Q | QMS does not require costly servers and can be set up in under a week. The platform is also exceptionally affordable; a single device facilitating quality inspectors on the production floor will cost as little as Rs. 175 per day. RES.Q | QMS is also 100% paperless and functions via a device positioned with a supervisor at the end of each factory line.
The solution builds on a concept known as Industry 4.0, which advocates the idea of a ‘smart factory’. In a smart factory, digital and physical systems monitor the physical processes on the factory floor to bring greater visibility and speed to the decision-making process. Apparel has struggled to move towards Industry 4.0, as it is constrained by the inability of systems to fully address or resolve issues unique to the manufacturing process. RES.Q | QMS fills a critical technology gap, helping decision-makers tackle hidden and often recurring quality issues which often eat away at profitability, head-on.
RES.Q | QMS in effect improves the overall cut-to-ship ratio faced by apparel manufacturers. The cut-to-ship ratio is a key performance indicator in any garment factory and represents the losses incurred from the point a factory cuts pieces of a garment to fulfill an order to when it is shipped out to the customer.
In Sri Lanka, where apparel is an industry with $ 4 billion turnover, the average cut to ship ratio is 98% - for most manufacturers the loss is incurred in millions. RES.Q | QMS estimates that with its analytical insight, manufacturers can cut back on this 2% loss, for example, by reducing internal sewing line defects by 50% and cutting the traditional 10% end of line defect rate by half, thus saving up to $ 40-80 million per year on internal defects. This is a conservative estimate, given that actual defect rates are usually much higher than those published.
RES.Q | QMS can achieve this by streamlining the quality inspection process and focusing on addressing the hidden costs of production, in most cases, known as the ‘re-work rate’. RES.Q | QMS captures and analyses production quality to deliver specific, actionable data that can identify the top defects of a particular garment type. Smarter with use, RES.Q | QMS helps decision-makers leverage a knowledge-base of issue remedies and best practices, drastically reducing the time spent resolving quality problems and serving as the backbone of production-related decision-making.
Attendees at the launch were taken through a simulated factory production floor to better understand how RES.Q | QMS works
“We developed RES.Q | QMS because we know the challenges faced by apparel manufacturers intimately. We field tested our solution for over a year within Hirdaramani factories. We were deliberate and methodical because it was really important to us to get this right. Now, the end product can be used by any apparel manufacturer to make highly informed decisions quickly and efficiently to significantly reduce the huge losses the apparel industry is making due to quality issues,” shared H One Chief Executive Officer Samath Fernando at the launch.
He added: “H One has made a reputation for offering our clients innovative technology solutions that get to the root cause of their problems in order to address them. RES.Q | QMS is an especially remarkable achievement for us; our parent company is one of Sri Lanka’s most recognised names in the apparel industry, so it really is a solution that was developed by apparel, for apparel.”
An attendee tries out RES.Q | QMS with the assistance of a quality inspector and the RES.Q team at the launch event
This software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution comes to decision-makers in three user-friendly interfaces. The quality inspector interface allows for easy, efficient and accurate data capture from the factory floor; the quality planner portal is for quality administrative users to ensure 100% control over quality inspections with a knowledge hub and a solution centre to help track and remedy defects in real-time; and the dashboard for top management users allows a user to visualise all quality data via charts, graphs and more. The data is available in real-time, enabling decision-makers to make production-crucial and time-sensitive decisions instantly with the right information.
