Thai textile powerhouse, Nan Yang Textile Group, reducing planning time by 66% and boosting efficiency

Coats Digital is delighted to announce that following the implementation of Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan solution, leading vertically integrated garment specialist, Nan Yan Textile Group has drastically reduced its planning time from three days to one and improved its OTDP by 10 percent since its adoption of FastReactPlan in 2019. The solution has enabled the company to connect and consolidate information across disparate sources into one highly visual, unified system. Management and employees benefit from a single, clear overview of the production plan, unlocking additional capacity to drive new business growth and providing the agility to respond swiftly to customer change requests.

Headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand, Nan Yang Textile Group was founded in 1958 and has now expanded to include 14 affiliated companies operating across multiple sites in South East Asia and USA. As a vertically integrated business, Nan Yang provides a range of textile solutions from spinning, knitting to apparel making. The company is dedicated to the development of cutting-edge products and processes, sustainability and value-added services across the supply chain, creating a superlative one-stop shop for its global partners. With a 360 degree view of the entire production process – from design to logistics, Nan Yang Textile Group has a unique understanding of its customer requirements and market trends, and openly encourages cross-functional innovation. The company employs a workforce of over 12,000 and its customers include: Nike, Tommy Bahama, Lululemon, Spyder Omin and Puma, among many others.

Prior to implementing FastReactPlan, Nan Yang Textile Group found that a reliance on using Excel spreadsheets to create capacity plans, resulted in significant gaps between production plans and actual production outputs – causing severe discrepancies in the plans from the initial stages to the sewing lines. The need to simplify instructions to fit line schedules on the factory floor also resulted in time-consuming meetings to make continual corrections, which diverted valuable peoplepower and time away from more strategic, value-adding activities to improve the business.

With no proactive and responsive approach to deal with deviations from the initial plan, Nan Yang Textile Group found it difficult to handle tasks with complex style variations that utilised a more diverse range of materials. Because it was such a time-consuming process to analyse problems and find the relevant information needed to solve issues, there was often not only a delay in production operations, but also a failure to meet exportation timelines.

Following the implementation of FastReactPlan, Nan Yang Textile Group quickly eradicated its reliance on spreadsheets from multiple sources completely, so that planning and scheduling teams could benefit from access to business critical planning information from the same, single, digitised source. The enhanced data visibility fosters seamless collaboration across teams, enabling them to manage diverse orders and change requests swiftly. Thanks to FastReactPlan’s automatic notifications and data alerts, the teams are able to proactively address issues and opportunities, such as predict and plan for minute-to-minute production changes that are required on the factory floor, which significantly improve forecasting efficiencies, whilst reducing the need for firefighting at the same time.

Since implementing FastReactPlan, Nan Yang Textile Group has been able to reduce its arduous planning time from three days to just one, which has meant that planners can spend 66 percent more time focusing their attention on enhancing customer service and supporting business growth. Increased efficiencies across the business have also resulted in a remarkable 10 percent improvement in OTDP – which has saved significant overhead costs in overtime and unnecessary, expedited freight costs.

Kanjana Meim, Production Planning Control Department Manager, Nan Yang Textile Group, said: “FastReactPlan has been a game-changer for our production planning team, enabling us to foresee our plans in a visually intuitive manner. The system’s ability to translate complex data into a highly visualised plan has been invaluable, offering us a comprehensive overview that empowers our planners to anticipate and strategise effectively.

The use of colours to identify late orders and material shortages has streamlined our decision-making processes, allowing for quick identification of critical issues that require attention. Additionally, the efficiency function tailored by product type has brought a new level of realism to our planning procedures. This nuanced approach ensures that our planning is not just efficient, but also tailored to the unique demands of each product category. FastReactPlan’s capabilities have significantly elevated our planning precision and responsiveness as a result, and positioned us to excel in a fast-paced and ever-evolving market.”

Part of Coats Digital’s core Manufacturing Solution Suite, FastReactPlan is a dynamic, visual production planning and control tool that optimises delivery, efficiency and lead times. Designed and developed specifically for footwear and apparel manufacturers, it helps companies integrate capacity, critical path and materials into an integrated planning system.

Pakawan Veerarote, Customer Success Manager, Coats Digital: said: “Nan Yang Textile Group is recognised globally as the ASEAN leader in innovative textile and garment solutions and we are thrilled that it has significantly optimised its production efficiencies since its adoption of FastReactPlan. The solution has provided greater data visibility and one version of the truth, so that all relevant departments can communicate easily to eradicate problems quickly, and we look forward to working closely with Nan Yang to continue to support its ongoing digitization journey.