See the Manufacturing and Distribution sections below to see how STYLEman ERP can work for you.
Product Setup
STYLEman has been designed from conception to cater for garment and footwear production. The product setup is inherently colour and size dependent and allows the use of fittings (for example, leg lengths, bra cups or shoe widths) if required. It’s a multi-level solution that allows for data to be entered at any level in the matrix, so costs, prices, or BOM items, for example, can be entered at any level of style, colour, fitting or size as appropriate.
Bill of Labour (Routing)
The multidimensional structure of STYLEman is also evident in the Bill of Labour.
In a generic production system, not designed for garments or footwear, each SKU (size) will need its own BOL, so that for a style having 4 colours and 6 sizes, each operation (even if it’s the same for all colours and sizes) must be entered 24 times.
STYLEman allows operations to be attached to the style at the most appropriate level and its clever maintenance program is designed for rapid input of the BOL. An operation that is the same regardless of colour or size will only need entering once and is automatically inherited by all variants within the style.
If you currently use GSD to plan the operations of a style, this data can be imported into STYLEman automatically.
Materials Requirements Planning
Raw material inventory and purchases can be planned in a number of ways in STYLEman.
- From Forecast
If sales contracts are not yet available, you can still plan your material requirements. Sales forecasts can be entered by style, colour and size or by selling ratios across colours and sizes. Forecast quantities by period for some styles can be combined with actual sales quantities for other styles and the combined values are then multiplied through the Bill of Materials to calculate the requirement.
Weekly requirements are then compared to current inventory and existing inbound purchase orders to calculate a suggestion to buy. Scrap allowances, buffer stock thresholds and stock in QC can be included in the calculations if required.
The suggested quantities for raw materials and multi-level subassemblies can be automatically purchased from the MRP.
- From Contract/Sales Orders
If you already have sales contracts and prefer to purchase materials specifically to one or a group of contracts, STYLEman will allow you the flexibility to achieve this. Simply enter one or many sales order numbers and STYLEman will calculate what’s needed and allow you to modify the suggested suppliers, delivery dates and quantities.
The suggested quantities for raw materials and multi-level subassemblies can be automatically purchased from the trial kitting
- From Production/CMT Orders
If you prefer to group sales orders up into production and/or CMT orders before planning the materials, STYLEman will also allow this.
Simply enter the production or CMT order numbers and STYLEman will calculate what’s needed and allow you to modify the suggested suppliers, delivery dates and quantities.
The suggested quantities for raw materials and multi-level subassemblies can be automatically purchased from here and the resulting material purchase orders are linked and tracked against the parent production or CMT order.
Cutting Room Planning
Our unique cutting planning solution is used for optimized scheduling and monitoring of garment cutting activities in apparel manufacturing. It provides on-time delivery of cut fabric to meet production demands, planning and monitoring of the entire cutting cycle at the click of a button and efficiency based employee rewards.
We provide a comprehensive set of tools to assist in the planning process which include embedded fabric cutting expertise, convenient import of customer orders from any external system, import of relevant bills of material from an external system, simple creation of cutting dockets from one or multiple factories, assignment of markers to dockets from marker library and generation of optimized cutting schedule in sync with sewing plan.
Operations can be monitored at each stage of the cutting process using barcode scanners. Reports are provided to monitor production throughput and efficiencies for teams and individuals.
Docket Features
- Dockets can be created to cut production order fabric requirements
- A single production order can be distributed among many dockets, or many production orders can be assigned to one docket
- Fabric, style, size details and the number of layers of fabric for cutting can be specified
- The cutting machine for a docket can be selected
- Fabric specific cutting requirements i.e. relaxation, post-laying and post-cutting durations can be specified.
Production Receipt and Despatch
As product comes off the production line it can be scanned into cartons and a carton label will be generated.
As a carton is received into the stores it can be assigned onto a customer shipment. A shipment can be one or many orders grouped together ready for despatch.
Despatching is a simple process where the shipment number is selected and the weight, cube and bill of lading details are entered. Full traceability is maintained from the shipment header to the sales orders and down to the carton contents and packing lists, and invoices can be automatically produced.
Product Costing
STYLEman uses flexible costing formats to allow you to build up the standard costs of a style using the components you use in your business. The component parts of a style costing can be built up automatically from the Bill of Materials and the Bill of Labour (Routing), with additional items, for example overheads or margins, either calculated on a percentage basis or entered manually.
The initial product costing is used as a standard base and all production order actual values are recorded and compared to the base costing for real margin analysis.
Bill of Materials
The true multidimensional structure of STYLEman makes itself very evident in the Bill of Materials.
In a generic production system, not designed for garments or footwear, each SKU (size) will need its own BOM so that for a style with 4 colours and 6 sizes, each material item (even if it’s the same for all colours and sizes) must be entered 24 times.
STYLEman allows materials (or subassemblies) to be attached to the style at the most appropriate level and has a clever maintenance program designed for rapid input of the BOM. A material that is the same regardless of colour or size will only need entering once and is automatically inherited by all variants within the style.
The Bill of Materials also allows individual materials to be posted to different steps in the style costing, so if you want to break materials down to a more detailed level in the costing, trim items can be posted to the “trimming line” in the costing and main materials can be posted to the “main materials” line, for example.
Powerful facilities exist to mass-duplicate, duplicate and change, and substitute materials immediately or in the future, and track full BOM change history.
Sales Order Processing
Sales contracts from your customers can be entered into STYLEman via EDI, B2B web order entry or manually through the efficiently simple Order Entry program.
An individual or group of sales orders can be used to calculate material requirements immediately and create production orders or third party CMT orders at the push of a button.
Customer specific critical path formats allow you to follow up on the events that are essential for your customers. STYLEman has in built workflow to notify merchandisers, production planners, stores and shop floor personnel of imminent and overdue critical path events. This ensures everyone in your organisation is aware of the status and progression of every production order and the impact this may have on customer delivery.
Materials Purchasing and Inventory
Raw materials (and subassemblies) can be purchased manually by the operator or generated automatically from the MRP module above.
A material purchase order can contain multiple raw material items with multiple delivery dates if required. The critical path attached to every material purchase order ensures the relevant personnel are notified when an event becomes imminent.
Material purchase orders can be raised as unconfirmed, requiring authorised personnel to approve and confirm before sending to the supplier.
Multiple currency costing with budget and actual exchange rates allow you to accurately compare your budget material costs to the actual receipt costs.
Stock receipts and GRN generation can be performed using Wi-Fi scanners in multiple warehouses and locations. STYLEman supports full Case/Roll control and the details of each unique Case/Roll can be recorded at the time of receipt, allowing unique bar-coded labels to be generated.
Full stock movement auditing is provided against all stock movements (receipts, adjustments, transfers, stock count, issues, consumption, returns).
If your company has inspection machine facilities for fabric rolls, the data collated by the inspection can automatically be used as a GRN into STYLEman.
Production Planning – Fast React
Fast React is the industry-leading graphical planning tool, providing quick, simple and visual means of scheduling and loading orders directly against factories, production lines, machine types or any other key manufacturing resource. Fast React can be loaded directly from STYLEman with styles, orders and material production orders, which may then be visualised on the board, changing colour dynamically as they are rescheduled to indicate early, on-time or late completion.
An intuitive, simple graphical interface allows all problems to be seen on one screen and re-planning is as simple as moving orders with the mouse. Fast React takes care of all of the complex mathematics and allows you to concentrate on the decision-making process enabling you to react quickly to changes in customer demands and difficulties in production whilst maintaining optimum use of resources.
Material Allocation & Issues
Facilities exist to allocate (reserve) material stocks to production/CMT orders as they become available. Allocation can be performed at the production order level for all materials or at the material level for all production orders.
Materials are issued to the production floor as required. Issuing is a Wi-Fi scanner-based activity where rolls or boxes are scanned and automatically moved into WIP. An ad hoc issuing program allows the stores to send additional items required by production to WIP.
Issuing materials to a third party CMT order allows all the materials sent to the sub-contractor to be tracked for accurate consumption.
Work In Progress
The STYLEman WIP module allows production to be tracked using line or modular production methods.
Bar-coded stickers are produced with each operation and SMV to the bundle quantity of your choice. Scanning of both the operator and individual operations stickers allows detailed analysis of the operators’ performance and efficiency. This analysis rolls up to the module/line/factory levels.
Inline quality monitoring and recording allows accurate analysis of reworks and rejected items.
Scanning of the bundles provides real-time progression of the quantities through the production order WIP stages providing accurate information to the production planning and merchandising teams.
Product Setup
STYLEman has been designed from the outset to cater for garment and footwear production. The product setup is inherently colour and size dependent and allows the use of fittings (such as leg lengths, bra cups, or shoe widths) if required. It’s a multi-level solution that allows for data to be entered at any level in the matrix so, for example, budget costings, costs or prices can be entered at any level of style, colour, fitting or size as appropriate.
If you’re a larger organisation with multiple trading companies, you’ll appreciate the Central Style Maintenance functions where you centrally control all aspects of a style except those that the individual marketing companies are allowed to modify (for example, descriptions, costs or prices).
STYLEman supports a number of different pack options including: single colour/single size, single colour/multi-size, multicolour/multi-size, multi-style/colour merchandise packs and promotion sets.
Sales Order Capture
Sales orders from your customers can be entered into STYLEman via EDI, B2B web order entry, salesman web order entry or manually through the efficiently simple Order Entry program.
Forward orders can be entered using the season/capsule/brand attributes of the products to rapidly home in on the range you’re trying to sell.
For stock ordering, STYLEman provides real time availability quantities so you can reliably inform the customer of what’s available today, next week, next month, etc. Online credit checking provides interactive tools for the salesperson.
We provide a comprehensive suite of order book management tools that include:
- Mass order duplication
- Single order duplicate & change
- EDI gateway
- Contract call-offs
- Range rationalisation to switch products after the selling period
- Multiple item substitutions
- Customer cancellation letters
If you have multiple brands with different sales people selling into one account with different commissions and trading terms, STYLEman order processing takes care of it.
Sales Order Processing
Stock Allocation
Finished goods inventory is reserved against sales orders using both bulk automatic and manual allocation.
Bulk allocation uses rule sets to define which orders should be selected for allocation by use of a multitude of selection criteria (for example, customer types, countries, brands, groups or salesman). Once a pool of sales orders has been selected, they will be allocated using the priority of the customer and the delivery dates on the sales orders. Both trial and actual run options provide the user with a choice of reports detailing exactly which orders did and did not get allocated with reasons why. Facilities exist to allocate all styles received in a defined date range and automatically apportion the stock quantity to the customer’s order quantity where a shortage occurs.
Manual allocation allows the user to choose exactly which order lines should be allocated and is particularly useful when stock is being run down and multiple order lines need to be modified to spread the allocation.
STYLEman also supports soft allocation where the expected delivery of a sales order line is continually calculated to allow operators the ability to accurately predict to the customer when the order could be satisfied.
Picking
Picking tickets are generated for sales orders using both bulk automatic and manual allocation and orders can be picked from either an allocated or open status.
Bulk picking uses rule sets to define which orders should be selected for picking by use of a multitude of selection criteria (for example, customer types, countries, brands, groups or salesman). Both trial and actual run options provide the user with a choice of reports detailing exactly which orders did and did not get picked with reasons why, which can include customer over credit limit, customer over terms, minimum order pick percentage and minimum percentage of key sizes.
Manual picking allows the user to choose exactly which order lines should be picked.
The warehouse(s) can contain both pick face and bulk locations if required and automatic replenishment of stock from the bulk to pick face locations may be triggered during a pick run. Bulk summary reports can be produced where a bulk pick is performed to satisfy a packing station.
Packing
For Pick and Pack operation, carton packing can be performed using scanners with the immediate production of a packing list and carton label.
If orders have been picked well in advance of the delivery requirement they can be packed away using the “Pack & Hold” facility. This allows all documentation to be produced and the goods to be located in a holding area ready for despatch.
Despatch
The despatching program in STYLEman allows for a number of different options. Multiple picking tickets can be consolidated onto one despatch and multiple despatches can be combined onto one invoice. Invoices can be created in the ledger immediately at despatch or later as required by the customer. Multiple invoices can be consolidated up to a weekly or monthly invoice for the customer.
Documentation produced at despatch includes despatch notes, carton labels, carrier consignment notes, ASNs and export invoices.
Product Costing
STYLEman uses flexible costing formats to allow you to build up the standard costs of a style using the components you use in your business. The component parts of a style costing can be built up automatically from freight, quota and duty tables in STYLEprm, with additional items such as overheads or margins either calculated on a percentage basis or entered manually.
The initial product costing is used as a standard base and all inbound purchase order actual values are recorded and compared to the base costing for real margin analysis.
CRM
All contacts made to your organisation from a customer can be recorded and analysed in STYLEman. Each occurrence is given a contact analysis code and allows the recorder to write detailed description of the event and either close it immediately (with a contact resolution analysis code) or leave it outstanding with an expected resolution date and time.
At this point, the contact record may be left with the operator that recorded the call or reassigned to another operator, in which case it will appear in the “Workflow Tasks” section on their My STYLEman page.
Finished Goods Purchasing
Finished goods (fully factored or CMT) can be purchased manually by the operator (for a grouping of sales orders or back-to-back) or generated automatically from the suggested purchase orders module.
If you’re a larger organisation with multiple trading companies and/or distributors, STYLEman allows a central procurement company to collate demand from other companies and purchase goods centrally.
A style purchase order can contain multiple styles with multiple delivery dates if required. The critical path attached to every style purchase order ensures the relevant personnel are notified when an event becomes imminent. Full delay history is maintained with reason codes and number of days for later supplier performance analysis.
Style purchase orders can be raised as unconfirmed, requiring authorised personnel to approve and confirm before sending to the supplier.
Multiple currency costing with budget and actual exchange rates allow you to accurately compare your budget style costs to the actual receipt costs.
Purchase orders from multiple suppliers can be consolidated and put onto one shipment for simple inbound tracking and apportionment of freight invoices. Containers, bills of lading and letter of credit details can all be recorded.
Stock receipts and GRN generation can be performed using Wi-Fi scanners in multiple warehouses and locations.
Warehouse Management
STYLEwms is a Wi-Fi based warehouse management module that allows the following functions to be performed on mobile scanners: purchase order receipts, stock putaway, pick face transfers, interactive Pick and Pack, inventory counting, location labelling, inventory enquiries, and Cash & Carry sales.
Facilities exist in STYLEman to manage putaway rules, monitor warehouse and operative activity and analyse operative performance.
Returns Processing
The STYLEman returns module starts with the issuing of a return authorisation to the customer and this is typically a customer service function. Facilities exist to record as much information as the customer can give regarding the returns and to generate the next sequential authorisation number.
The warehouse is normally the next link in the return chain. They can see details of authorisations that have been issued but have not yet arrived at the warehouse. As goods come in, the warehouse can enter a goods returned note into STYLEman. Ideally this is related to an authorisation but this is not mandatory.
The warehouse may have time to fully QC the returns and assign a quality code (perfect/seconds/scrap) to the item along with a reason for the return. If the warehouse does not currently have time for the full QC process, they can still book the goods in for later QC.
The next link in the chain is the office to create a credit note. They can see all outstanding authorisations and GRNs in the warehouse. Once a GRN is fully QC checked, it can be credited (a credit note can also be created without a GRN if required). If the credit office can relate the goods returned to an original invoice, this will help with pricing of the credit note. If the original invoice is not known, STYLEman will locate the lowest price available for that customer over a specified time.
Credit notes can also be created for extra values (for example, carriage) and non-stock returns still related to the original product invoiced (such as overcharges or short deliveries).