Rakhil Hirdaramani, Director, H One speaks at the RES.Q launch on the challenges of the global apparel manufacturing industry and why smart solutions are so critical moving forward
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 LKR 175 per day. RES.Q | QMS is also 100% paperless; and functions via a device positioned with a supervisor at the end of each factory line.
H One CEO and Hirdaramani CIO, Samath Fernando presents a tribute to Denver Jayasundara, Group GM of Jo Lanka Group - H One's first customer outside of the Hirdaramani Group
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 fulfil an order, to when it is shipped out to the customer. In Sri Lanka, where apparel is a USD 4 billion turnover industry, the average cut to ship ratio is 98% - for most manufacturers the loss is incurred in millions. RES.Q | QMS estimates that with its analytical insight, manufacturers can cut back on this 2% loss; for example, by reducing internal sewing line defects by 50% and cutting the traditional 10% end of line defect rate by half, thus saving up to USD 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.
Attendees at the launch were taken through a simulated factory production floor, to better understand how RES.Q | QMS works.
“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% 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.
An attendee tries out RES.Q | QMS with the assistance of a quality inspector and the RES.Q team at the launch event.
Commenting on its effectiveness Denver Jayasundara, Group General Manager of Jo Lanka Group – H One’s first RES.Q | QMS customer outside of the Hirdaramani Group 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%, and this result gave us confidence about what we could achieve with RES.Q | QMS in the future."
The first RES.Q solution, the Quality Management System (QMS) was launched on Thursday, 31 August to an audience of industry stakeholders. A Machine Inventory tool to track and manage apparel manufacturing assets and a Skill Profiling tool to track employee performance, both under the RES.Q portfolio, will follow. H One plans to serve markets beyond the region with this platform in notably thriving apparel markets in Vietnam, Bangladesh and Ethiopia. To learn more about RES.Q | QMS solution, contact RES.Q Business Development on +94 778 177 023 or info@apparelresq.com.
CEO of H One, Samath Fernando showcases RES.Q's mobile interface and dashboards
