Fabric Requirements Planning

A current customer has a group that manages large fabric buys on spreadsheets.  They need to keep track of purchased yardage versus required yardage for all styles that use a fabric, so these spreadsheets hold an incredible amount of detail. This process had become very cumbersome, and quite honestly, was not being kept up to date.  This inspired them to think about Intellimas as they were already using it for product costing.  The data to pull all of this together is in various places in an existing system, but there is no easy way to retrieve it, consolidate it, and then manage it.  So we worked together to build an entity to pull together fabric master data, ownership information, style requirements and P.O. commitments. The entity rolls up to the fabric level to give them an accurate account of either yardage available or yardage required.  What a superb idea!  

• Problem:  Spreadsheet approach to manage fabric utilization and purchases
• Solution:  Intellimas entity that pulls Fabric and Bill of Material data from a PLM module along with production quantities and fabric order yardage from the Supply Chain module.  End users update yields and add wastage to come up with a total utilization for each fabric.
• Intellimas Goal:  manage fabric buys and reduce liability

         CAD Designer Workload

  Drawing and designing images for products can be a time consuming process and not everyone is in-tune with the amount of time this takes and how much of an impact it has on the design cycle.  One of our newer customers decided that, instead of having a Design Manager estimate and prioritize workload manually for their CAD room, they would use an entity to keep track of this.  The concept behind this entity is to determine accurate timelines for CAD work but also obtain visibility to which group does the most revisions which results in rework.  The entity was tied to the program so that various metrics could be created such as average turn time per designer, customer, and program.

• Problem:  No consistent way of managing workload and turn time expectations for CAD designers
• Solution:  Intellimas entity that pulls style data from a database and allows users to record new work assigned to them, and the time to complete that work
• Intellimas Goal:  Track throughput and turn time for CAD work in order to measure and improve productivity.

Complete Product Lifecycle Calendar Management

How many times do we hear about workflow in our industry?  In very few companies, workflow is structured and implemented well. In most, the "out of the box" workflow just doesn't work.  Tasks are completed in random order depending on what type of program it is, what vendor is making the style, what color we run it in, what day of the week it is (well, not really, but you know what we mean).  One of our customers is interested in using Intellimas for the smaller, but extremely important, iterative tasks like lab dip approvals, fit approvals and the like which will help them spot problems at a detail level and react to them.  What makes this situation unique however, is that they would like to roll up these approvals to their production calendar.   Having the ability to roll up the smaller task approvals to a production timeline will help them manage the true lifecycle of a program.  Therefore they can issue a production order and know where they stand with approvals which gives them a heads up to a possible delay in the start of production.

• Problem: Business units do not have visibility to all milestones within a program, which leads to delivery issues down the line
• Solution: Introduce Intellimas to track Pre-Production milestones. Use the status of those milestones to roll up to a P.O. Level for full lifecycle visibility and to calculate realistic timelines to In Store Dates.
• Intellimas Goal: Manage detailed pre-production tasks