Leading fashion-management group Pod, previously known as Designer Textiles Ltd, is an established, publicly listed company.

Pod is composed of three independent but complementary textile, fashion-wear and home furnishing manufacturers that supply a large range of products to both the domestic and international markets.

Products range from Merino wool designer wear to hi-tech performance gear; from fashion-wear to homewares; and from curtains to casual wear.

Companies under the Pod umbrella include Designer Textiles International, Mollers Homewares and Michele Ann.

Integrated group future
The largest of the Pod companies, Designer Textiles, was running Infomace for financial management, alongside a non-integrated suite of purpose-developed software to manage its production operation. This solution encompassed manufacturing, technical databases, production-tracking, and the receiving and processing of sales orders, but did not interface with the financial solution.

Mollers Homewares was running Acumen, while the smallest company in the group, Michele Ann, relied on MYOB and spreadsheets.

Each company had joined the group at a different time and was heading in a different direction. Individually, they were facing issues around out-growing their respective solutions.

The decision was made to put all the companies on to the same solution, which would offer a single financial view of the group, and a unified management structure.

Koorb Consulting was selected to implement Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP solution.

Rolling out AX
Mollers Homewares was the first company to roll out the new ERP solution, followed by Michele Ann and then Designer Textiles.

Mollers Homewares, with 35 users, had been finding the inflexible solution it was running was constraining its business and preventing it from progressing. Dynamics AX offered a full range of integrated functionality, and modifications developed by Koorb enabled barcode scanning of production and of pick-and-pack into cartons.

Integration with the sales forecasting tools and business-to-business integration with major customers (consisting of more than 80 percent of total business) for processing orders and invoicing was also enabled. The implementation went smoothly, with the old solution being turned off one day and Dynamics AX being turned on – and up and running – the next day.

Smooth running
Michele Ann, with around 30 users, was dependent on a non-integrated and disparate group of relatively low level solutions. Again, the implementation of Dynamics AX provided a full suite of functionality, from general ledger to master planning.

The final implementation was at Designer Textiles. Jonathan Bird, now IT Manager for Pod, had considerable involvement in this implementation. He had an in-depth knowledge of Designer Textiles’ business as a result of developing the original custom operations solution earlier at the company.

Designer Textiles was the largest and most complex of the implementations, with 55 users. The implementation required the blending of Dynamics AX best-practice with the proven processes of the previous solution. Resistance to the new solution was high, with users having a strong attachment to the highly functional solution they were then using.

Bird, however, saw very quickly that moving away from the custom solution he had developed to Dynamics AX was a good move.

“The vision for the company was to provide full visibility across all aspects of all the businesses in an environment where we could move forward as a group.”

Because of the complicated nature of Designer Textiles’ manufacturing processes, the implementation lead-time was over 15 months. As the implementation progressed, the go-live day was pushed back several times, both to work around resistance to the Dynamics AX solution and to modify it to fit some specific but important parts of the business process.

Elastic business
Unlike many businesses, some of Designer Textiles’ products are subject – literally – to stretching and shrinkage. The nature of the fabric the company manufactures is elastic. So, while a customer might order 500 metres and the company might run what appears to be a batch of 500 metres, the end-product might actually finish up as much as 10 percent over or under in total metre-length.

The customer is billed for the end-length, be it under or over the requested amount, and if the measure is short there can be no further production to make up the shortfall. This obviously causes a discrepancy between the quantity ordered, the quantity made and the end-invoice, a common situation in this industry, but one most ERP solutions are not equipped to handle without modification.

Add to this the complication that, although ordered by the metre, fabric can only be sold by the whole roll, rather than the metre. Yet, the production order may produce more or fewer metres than needed. The traditional ERP will insist that the shortfall is made up by running further fabric, but this isn’t possible.

“Because of this, the implications for the master scheduling and planning systems were such that we needed to do some pretty dramatic modifications,” says Bird.

“Then add another complexity in that Designer Textiles, when producing work orders, has stages where several work orders can come together to be processed concurrently as one order, and then split out again to carry on through their remaining processes. Few ERPs are designed to handle this – they’re, generally, designed to simply start and finish a work order.

“One thing this implementation did was, for the first time, reveal the complexity of the operations, which had been hidden away inside the original solution. It also wasn’t understood that the solution I’d developed had been fairly organic in its growth, with functionality being added on as required over time. Koorb and AX had to recreate all of this within a much shorter timeframe.

“At the time people didn’t hesitate to question quite
vigorously why we were moving to a new solution, but
now everybody says it’s the best thing we ever did. There
are sufficient downstream benefits – more visibility,
especially as every aspect of the business is integrated
– that people can see and appreciate the final, positive,
outcome.

“Now, for example, we can do an inventory valuation at the push of a button. In the past, we used to have to export a whole pile of inventory information into an access database and manipulate it, and then assign values to it from somewhere else. It was a full-day process, whereas now we always have an inventory evaluation at month’s end. In significant areas, the company has moved a long way forward.”

Future under one umbrella
Dynamics AX has enabled visibility across the group, presenting a unified view of all the companies under the Pod umbrella. And Bird is impressed. “I think of all the ERP systems I’ve seen and worked with, if you want to be in a single environment then Dynamics AX is probably closest to the best because of its modification ability – it not only enables, it empowers.”

For more information
> Koorb Consulting
Nicholas Birch
nbirch@koorb.co.nz
Ph 09 361 1304