Hela Clothing to invigorate apparel industry with Microsoft

Tuesday, 14 March 2017 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Hela Clothing, a leading apparel manufacturer, partnering with Microsoft recently embraced digital transformation to revitalise the apparel industry. As the shift to a more digitally enhanced manufacturing era accelerates, the opportunity to deliver long-term digital solutions and insights has accelerated Hela Clothing’s ambition for modern, secure and efficient solutions such as Microsoft’s Office365 and Hyper-V platforms.

“Businesses that embrace digital transformation generate materially more operating income each year than those who do not,” said Brian Kealey, Managing Director for Microsoft Sri Lanka and Maldives. “And with Sri Lankan companies faced with evolving customer and employee expectations, it’s increasingly challenging to be productive without a comprehensive, board level digital transformation plan.”

The partnership with Microsoft has allowed Hela Clothing to choose Office 365 — over a number of others including other cloud competitors — as its preferred means of collaborating and communicating in the workforce. The platform is described as comprehensive and congruent; designed only to drive up productivity, with features that include: email, social networking, team chat services, instant messaging, personal cloud file sharing, shared document workspaces and an enterprise portal.

Furthermore, Hela Clothing opted to replace Red Hat Virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V. A platform aimed at consolidating Hela Clothing’s digital infrastructure to remote desktop and application virtualisation systems. As a consequence, Hyper-V has increased Hela Clothing’s hardware utilisation by consolidating servers and workloads onto fewer and more powerful physical computers. Moreover, the platform decreased capital expenditure such as power and physical space.

“Focusing on digital transformation with Microsoft’s secure and comprehensive cloud enabled platforms has played a crucial role to our success,” said Thilina Samarasinghe, Group Head of IT of Hela Clothing. “Now that Microsoft has reduced our capex on server hardware and increased real-time communication, productivity at Hela Clothing is at an all-time high. With Microsoft, we will remain committed to innovating and accelerating insightful intelligence across the apparel sector.”

Further to the current deployment, Microsoft will continue to work with Hela Clothing to help them envision and implement more integrated platforms like Skype for Business through Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Partner, Infront Consulting Group.

Country Manager for Infront Consulting, Susantha Silva added, “We visualised an IT roadmap for Hela Clothing solely on what its short and long term plans were. And now that the apparel giant has carried out the implementation, we are in the process of offering new insights for further digital transformation.”

In this context, Hela Clothing has fully leveraged the opportunities of present digital technologies to become a forerunner in the apparel industry.