Carrington Textiles reduce manufacturing costs with sofco Planning

Carrington Textiles, the UK’s largest producer of workwear fabrics, enhance planning capabilities and reduce manufacturing costs with sofco Planning

Carrington Textiles are a global workwear textile manufacturer exporting to more than 80 countries and produce 130 million metres of fabric annually as a group, from their factories in Pakistan, Portugal and the UK. Carrington have over 1600 products, 28 manufacturing lines and in excess of 500 production orders over a 3-month scheduling horizon. Specialising in the development of fabrics and finishes with exceptional performance in the most demanding workplace environments. Developing new ideas to meet the most stringent performance requirements encountered in diverse areas such as heavy industry, light engineering, food processing, retail, distribution, pharmaceutical, healthcare and defence.

The Challenge

Carrington needed a tool that incorporated automated forecasting functionality and a user interface that allowed collaborative users to review and enhance the forecast quickly and easily from any location at any time. Specialist demand planners would be responsible for producing the statistical forecast and managing the overall process with the sales team directly applying known customer and market intelligence. It was vital that the system was embraced by the Sales team particularly.

Forecasting and managing demand over different time horizons is a primary and critical input, important to the wider operational planning processes. In the short-term, visibility of changes in demand and their impact on the production schedule is vital given the complexity of their manufacturing process and length of their supply chains. Coupled with this, better adaptability to market changes resulting in improved decision-making would benefit both customer service and production efficiency. In the longer-term planning horizon Carrington’s wanted enhanced strategic alignment between sales, operations, and overall business planning.

Why sofco?

The sofco team understand the environment Carrington operates in and the challenges they face and therefore proposed a solution and deployment plan that would deliver against Carrington’s requirements and more. In selecting sofco Carrington also went through a process of evaluating the production planning and scheduling capabilities. A successful evaluation meant that they could fulfil their longer term requirements for production planning, scheduling and S&OP from a single vendor.

The Solution

In order to execute a rapid deployment, the standard sofco Demand Planning Template was used for the functionality and user interface designs. This was presented at a Gap Analysis workshop where Carrington’s specific requirements around data structures and user collaboration were identified for project specific configuration over and above the template.

The template and gap analysis defined:

Data Structures

Product, market, location and time dimensions, hierarchies and attributes that matched the Carrington business allowing bottom up and top-down forecasting within filtered data slices that matched to roles and responsibilities of users.

Forecast Accuracy

The system automatically calculates absolute error and percentage error, and percentage bias measured at the product lead time. The forecast stability is displayed in a Slant/Waterfall chart showing the evolution of the forecast over the 12 forecasting cycles.

Forecast Collaboration

This was vital to the success of the project and involved both the sales/commercial teams and senior managers in the business. Two specific dashboards were configured:

• Salesperson Collaboration – this allows the salespeople to review the forecast v last year’s sales, current customer orders and make changes based on customer/market intelligence. It also allows them to enter a forecast that they receive from the customer which can be compared to the Carrington forecast.
• Product Type Collaboration – this is used by the senior team to review the forecast at an aggregate product type level based on volume, value and margin. It allows review of the forecast versus the last 2 years of sales and customer forecasts (from the salespeople). Top-down changes to the forecast can also be made and these are disaggregated based on the product | customer forecast from the salespeople.

Personnel Engagement and Training

The success, or failure, of a project like this can rest on the acceptance of a new system by the users. Experience tells us that this can be particularly challenging when salespeople are asked to interact with a planning system.

Three things were vital to gaining this acceptance. Firstly, the Carrington project team fully engaged with the salespeople to find out what information they wanted out of the system and how they would use it for maximum benefit with minimal effort in approving and enhancing the forecast. Secondly, the project team took this information to sofco, and the flexibility of the software and expertise of the consultants allowed the requirements to be configured as required. Finally, the salespeople owned their forecasts and are held accountable for the quality.

Carrington selected appropriate salespeople to be “champions” of the approach and customised training courses were run to roll the solution out over the rest of the sales team.