Textured Jersey goes ‘Live’ with FastReact

Textured Jersey Lanka, one of Sri Lanka’s largest weft knit fabric manufacturers and a joint venture between Pacific Textiles Hong Kong and Brandix Lanka added ‘FastReact’ planning to its ‘Best of Breed’ investment strategy, going ‘live’ in November this year.

FastReact is a specialist planning and management tool specifically designed for the apparel and textile industry. The state of the art manufacturing facility, located in the Seethawaka Industrial zone with the capacity to knit, dye and finish approximately 2.5 Million metres of weft knit fabric per month, now has the addition of its newest planning tool integrated into its SAP system providing visibility across the entire organisation.

The FastReact advantages include proactive management of customer projections and order receipts vs available capacity, vertical knit and dye planning, including full raw materials visibility, and actual production status of all orders at a glance.

MD Textured Jersey Lanka Rohan Gunathilake and MD FastReact Systems Andrew Brown

With a vision to be the Number one preferred supplier of weft knit fabric, Textured Jersey envisages a turnover of US $ 100 Million by the year 2010, investing in both dramatic growth and high quality technologies, including SAP ERP and a fully automated colour kitchen for the dyehouse, using Arel Recipe Management System and Colour Service software to meet its ultimate vision. Managing Director Rohan Goonetilleke commented that co-ordination between marketing, planning and production had always been a challenge, with numerous meetings required to quote accurate delivery dates for customer inquiries.

“With FastReact, all these functions are brought together within one centralised system and response time is decreased to half. The entire Textured Jersey team is excited about the benefits of the system, with their ‘buy in’ to the process and willingness to embrace the solution being fantastic.”

He also added that lead times are being reduced and existing practices will be refocused on for improvement. “The ability to use our available capacity well and to respond quickly, yet accurately to enquiries gives us a competitive edge - we’ve made a huge investment in the very best machinery, and with FastReact we can ensure that we utilise that investment well”.

General Manager Operations Shehan Witharana states that while the company researched its planning options thoroughly, “FastReact was the best tool on the market by far. Most importantly, it is not just a planning and scheduling tool, but also a business wide tool for improving visibility and coordination.

The linked planning boards for knitting and dyeing mean that each department knows exactly what was required of them and can work together towards the common goal of maximising ‘On Time Delivery Performance (OTDP per cent).”

Having observed that the Textured Jersey Lanka team is constantly striving to better standards, processes and practices, Managing Director of FastReact Systems, Andrew Brown enthuses that working practices at the facility are impressive including a remarkable control of materials inventory with a stock accuracy level close to 99.9 per cent. “This speaks volumes of the focus Textured Jersey has as a business.”