Sri Lanka’s leading enterprise solution provider H One launched RES.Q | QMS, a quality management solution tailor made to minimise defects in apparel manufacturing.
H One’s solution draws on the rich heritage of expertise provided by its parent company - Hirdaramani Group, a 120-year old apparel powerhouse in
Sri Lanka.
RES.Q | QMS is a cloud-based IT solution that provides decision-makers with a 360° view of factory floor production quality. It uses data analytics to improve production quality, eliminates reporting time lags, enables faster and more accurate decision-making, and reduces wastage. It can be used by anyone with minimal training, and easily adapted by apparel manufacturing businesses of any size - small, medium or large. RES.Q | QMS doesn’t require costly servers and can be set up in under a week. The platform is also exceptionally affordable; a single device facilitating quality inspectors on the production floor will cost as little as LKR175 per day. RES.Q | QMS is also 100 percent paperless; and functions via a device positioned with a supervisor at the end of each factory line.
The solution builds on a concept known as Industry 4.0, which advocates the idea of a ‘smart factory’. In a smart factory, digital and physical systems monitor the physical processes on the factory floor to bring greater visibility and speed to the decision-making process. Apparel has struggled to move towards Industry 4.0, as it is constrained by the inability of systems to fully address or resolve issues unique to the manufacturing process. RES.Q | QMS fills a critical technology gap, helping decision-makers tackle hidden and often recurring quality issues which often eat away at profitability, head-on.
RES.Q | QMS, in effect improves the overall cut-to-ship ratio faced by apparel manufacturers. The cut-to-ship ratio is a key performance indicator in any garment factory, and represents the losses incurred from the point a factory cuts pieces of a garment to fulfill an order, to when it is shipped out to the customer. In Sri Lanka, where apparel is a US$ four billion turnover industry, the average cut to ship ratio is 98 percent - for most manufacturers the loss is incurred in millions. RES.Q | QMS estimates that with its analytical insight, manufacturers can cut back on this two percent loss; for example, by reducing internal sewing line defects by 50 percent and cutting the traditional 10 percent end of line defect rate by half, thus saving up to US$40-80 million per year on internal defects. This is a conservative estimate, given that actual defect rates are usually much higher than
those published.
RES.Q | QMS can achieve this by streamlining the quality inspection process and focusing on addressing the hidden costs of production, in most cases, known as the ‘re-work rate’. RES.Q | QMS captures and analyses production quality to deliver specific, actionable data that can identify the top defects of a particular garment type. Smarter with use, RES.Q | QMS helps decision-makers leverage a knowledge-base of issue remedies and best practices, drastically reducing the time spent resolving quality problems, and serving as the backbone of production-related
decision making.
“We developed RES.Q | QMS because we know the challenges faced by apparel manufacturers intimately. We field-tested our solution for over a year within Hirdaramani factories. We were deliberate and methodical because it was really important to us to get this right. Now, the end product can be used by any apparel manufacturer to make highly informed decisions quickly and efficiently to significantly reduce the huge losses the apparel industry is making due to quality issues,” shared H One Chief Executive Officer Samath Fernando, at
the launch.
He also added: “H One has made a reputation for offering our clients innovative technology solutions that get to the root cause of their problems in order to address them. RES.Q | QMS is an especially remarkable achievement for us; our parent company is one of Sri Lanka’s most recognized names in the apparel industry, so it really is a solution that was developed by apparel,
for apparel.”
This software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution comes to decision-makers in three user-friendly interfaces. The quality inspector interface allows for easy, efficient and accurate data capture from the factory floor; the quality planner portal is for quality administrative users to ensure 100 percent control over quality inspections with a knowledge hub and a solution centre to help track and remedy defects in real-time; and the dashboard for top management users allows a user to visualize all quality data via charts, graphs and more. The data is available in real-time, enabling decision makers to make production-crucial and time-sensitive decisions instantly with the
right information.
Commenting on its effectiveness H One’s first RES.Q | QMS customer outside of the Hirdaramani Group, Jo Lanka Group Group General Manager Denver Jayasundara said: ‘‘After using RES.Q | QMS in our factories over a period of two months, we noticed a significant decline in the end-line defect rate by nearly 10 percent, and this result gave us confidence about what we could achieve with RES.Q | QMS in the future.”
