Top Form International is a leading manufacturer of women’s underwear and brasserie. Top Form has multiple manufacturing sites in Asia and distributes its products worldwide under OEM contracts with miscellaneous famous brand names, including Sara Lee’s Playtex, Vanity Fair’s Vasaret, Bendon, Natory and Mary-Jo.

Top Form has achieved significant efficiencies in its manufacturing by implementing Protex. “Protex has a strong focus on procurement management, so we are gradually experiencing reductions in our raw materials stock levels. We now get accurate information that includes how much raw materials we have, where this stock is stored, whether or not we have enough fabrics to support a specific order, and if not, how much we need to buy and when we need to buy it by,” commented Mr Fung, Chairman of Top Form International.

Challenge
Top Form has its head quarters in Hong Kong and manufacturing sites in China (Shenzen and Nanhoi), Philippines (Manila) and Thailand (Bangkok). Altogether there are over 6,000 sewing machines. Each manufacturing site has its own stock and any stock movements between sites need to be charged.

“We are competing on cost and quality and we are part of a fashion industry that is influenced by local taste and trends. So accordingly we need a good system to help with the overall efficiency of our manufacturing operations. We always strive to get our products to market faster and to reduce manufacturing costs,” explained Mr. Fung.

There are two types of manufacturing. The first type (”Make to Stock”) is where a company produces and sells finished goods out of stock. The second (”Make to Order”) is where production only starts when there is a customer order. This second type is applicable to Top Form. Systems that are suitable for the first type of manufacturing have an emphasis on finished goods inventory. The type of manufacturing solution Top Form was looking for needed to have an emphasis on material control and job costing.

Kevin Lui, project manager at Top Form, explains “The requirements in the apparel industry are very specific and a generic ERP solution is not suitable for us. The generic ERP solutions cannot handle the multiple levels of fit, size and colour that we have in a single product style. The raw material definition and units of measure are very specific to out industry as well.”

“Before we used Protex we used an in-house developed system. That system could not handle multiple factories. We short listed eight solution providers that were available in Hong Kong. Except for Protex, these solutions were incomplete. Most of them focussed on distribution and had hardly any manufacturing functionality. For us Material Requirement Planning (MRP) is crucial. We wanted the manufacturing, purchasing and distribution modules from the same vendor. Protex was the only solution covering all three areas well.”

Benefits
“In all apparel and footwear manufacturing companies you will typically find the same four major operation steps, being Cutting, Sewing, Inspection and Packing. Phase one we implemented Protex’s core functionality modules in all these four areas. Phase two we implemented the detailed steps within each of these four major operations. For example, within sewing we defined up to 40 operation steps within Protex. We have seen significant benefits following phase 1 and 2.”

“Firstly, we have reduced our raw materials stock levels. We now know exactly how much material to buy and when to buy it. Now that we use Protex, we can monitor the raw materials better and we have gradually reduced stock to a lower level.”

“Secondly, we have much better control over our own manpower and machine availability, compared with the order loading. This means we can do proper capacity planning. In our previous system we only had rough estimates that were mostly calculated manually. Now we have a much more scientific way to calculate our capacity, taking into account not only the manpower, machines and number of hours, but also variations that we may experience in producing a certain style of bra.”