Businesses all over the world are now facing fierce competition because of the liberalization of trade and globalization. Apparel Manufacturers are facing intensive global competition nowadays. Entrepreneurs are becoming more aware of the importance of modern management philosophy to provide the competitive advantage of the free-market system after the total abolition of the MFA in 2005.
Figure 1: Efficient merchandising can help to lower the cost.
Now the key to competition in the international market place is cost reduction besides quality and on-time delivery. Customer demands is now a wide variety of products at a lower cost as they have more opportunities to choose from different options.
Many apparel industry owners are trying to rationalize the cost reduction on wages cutting which is not only the way to minimize manufacturing cost. Some entrepreneurs are also focusing on productivity and efficiency improvement. Few factories are also working to establishing an efficient supply chain in the industry to minimize cost and optimum use of resources.
Besides all these strategies there is one major field is keeping unfocused is the merchandiser’s efficiency improvement, which needs to draw deep attention. Efficient merchandising can help to lower the cost. Merchandisers are the heart of the garment industry. They can contribute a lot to cost minimization. Every single mistake of merchandisers incurs cost increase.
Below are the major areas where merchandisers can focus on cost control:
Product development
During the development, stage merchandisers need to focus on the styling. Sometimes customer mentions some process of sewing which is difficult to maintain in bulk production and chances of rejection. If merchandisers discuss with the development team for analyzing and make an alternative option to minimize sewing difficulties, they can find an alternative.
There are many examples we see when bulk production starts, some sewing processes are difficult to continue or to keep quality or productivity is slow which leads bottleneck in the sewing line. If such a process was noticed before production or during development and discussed with the customer for alternative option approval, will help to prevent the operator sit idle in the line and save time to keep calculated SMV.