The headquarters of Shangdong Sunshell Group is located at Shangdong Zhucheng, it has 17 subordinates clothing factories. Shangdong Sunshell Group has become famous & large clothing manufacturing and clothing export trade group. Above 99% products are exporting to Japan, Korea, European Union, America, HK China and other regions. It has a complete production chain including weaving, dyeing, printing and clothing manufacturing.

Recently, the production cost are constantly increased, the foreign trade orders have transferred to emerging producing countries and regions, which has caused the big pressure to clothing manufacturing enterprises in China. Under the realistic environment of the high cost, Sunshell Group is also considering: how to maintain or further improve the productivity effect under OEM business mode. In 2012, on this basis of preliminary information transformation, Sunshell Group turned to optimizing production, bring the production to the lean development.

The system is very huge, where to begin?

17 subordinate factories, thousands of people, it is a big system that Sunshell Group operated. When practicing lean manufacturing, where we should start from? According to analysis and carding, Sunshell Group should consider the following three points first to get improvement.

Firstly, there’s a quite a lot of factories, the difficult is big for production coordination and management. The subordinate of Sunshell Group including fabric factory, knitting garment factory, woven garments factory…… the products are different, the referred material varieties are over ten thousand. When encountering great challenge by formulating production plan and coordinating the material requirements, it is nearly impossible to do well if only rely on manual way to manage.

Secondly, the factory scale is big, the single factory workshop can reach to dozens at most, the production line can up to hundreds of lines. In this hugeness production system, how to grasp the production schedule timely and accurately is also a big problem.

Thirdly, the workers are very much, thousands of people, which is not only enhance the difficulty of material control, but also add difficulty to difficulty at output, the efficiency of control and wage accounting

Previously, Sunshell used to introducing sets of application system in department level to improve the operation of each operating department. Sunshell also used to introducing financial management system to solve project. But Sunshell always can not do a effective optimize on production site management which is a core business inspect. Therefore, when seeking for a lean development, Sunsell Group put the key point of problem solving on production site management inspect.

There’s many schemes, how to choose the suitable ones?

As early as 2012, in the face of many production management systems in the market, Sunshell focus on type selection and inspection from the stability of the system structure, the bearing capacity of data, and implementation of the professional team. Because of the strict demand, Sunshell has not found the suitable system in a long time, the production innovation has been put aside. In 2014, Sunshell has established the connection with JiangSu Bealead. Sunshell has learned that Bealead can supply efficient factory management project, and Bealead has professional research and implementation team, and also it has the cooperation experience with over ten thousand factory, so it has brought Bealead into the subjects of the study.

However, what solution way should Sunsell bring into Bealead? At that time, the company has adopted traditional work ticket (bar code fe) to count system, the workers cut the process bar code on “code fe” as a production certificate, according to their own production status. Then gathered them together and scan & input into computer system for counting production, calculating the worker’s salary. This way will bring many problems, such as: the workers should keep the bar fe, the administrator should calculate the salary, the workload is heavy, the cost is high. Depending on scanning equipment will cause error bar code, the error rate of different device is different, at the same time the effect of scanning is relying heavily on print effect, the paper waste is big. Those problems caused the waste of human power and cost, data will be delayed and can not follow with the company’s process, the accuracy of production data can not get guarantee. Therefore, Sunshell considered to bring in Bealead “IE-BOX” system, and used RFID (radio frequency identification technology) to have subsidiary production and transformation.

In order to survey Bealead, before the cooperation, Sunshell proposed a demand that supplying system or scheme in one month to realize the workers who are supporting Chinese bank card (IC card) to gather the production data. According to this demand, Bealead system needs to connect bank card from Chinese bank and want to be a base for data gathering. This is a problem.

During the process to solve the above problems, Bealead has the connection with the relative banking institution in Qingdao where the Bank of China set up. After learning about the project, Bank of China in Qingdao Branch actively participates and contributes to finish the project together. They will supply the bank card —— this card can not only be the wage card of Sunshell’s workers, but also can be used to adopt data for Bealead system. The active participation of bank has helped Bealead team to meet the Sunshell’s demand in time and also guaranteed the quality. It has also realized synchronous improvement for the system data. From this setting test, Sunshell has know about the strength and the working efficiency of Bealead team, and then come to the cooperation for both side.

The implementation of new scheme, how to get the effect?

Sunshell firstly put the Bealead system into Fifth Third Facotry. The top management, financial department, IE department, production plan department, tailoring workshop, producing department, cutting piece storeroom, statistical department, personnel department have been involved in.

At the beginning of carrying out Bealead system scheme, the Fifth Third Factory have done the adjustment to the production, which will make the Bealead system can fit it. At the process of trial operation, Fifth Third Facotry have done emphatically investigation to data separating, real-time data acquisition, automatic calculation and statistical data. Then, Fifth Third Factory has organized the training of every department, which can make every department know better of the system using. After one period of time, the relative production process of new system can be smooth, the Fifth Third Factory can formally use Bealean system to have adopt and data collection.

In the implementation process, Fifth Third Facotry is not using paper work ticket any more. It has not only reduced the consumable items, but also save human power. It has realized the real-time collection of production data, which makes the system can statistic data automatically and calculate the salary. It can track quality, improve the level of quality control. Finally, the Fifth Third Facotry has successfully applied Bealed system, not only every data is accurate, but also it has obvious advantages in instantaneity, automated calculations. After that, Sunshell will use Bealead system to subordinate factories one after another.

Because there’s many subordinate factories of Sunshell and it has different product catagories, so Bealead system need to do the second development. Therefore, Bealead dispatched a team composed by implementer, developer and professional advisor to Sunshell to analyze the application requirements. According to the situation of different products, different factory, there’s a adjustment to RFID system to solve the problem one after another to every factory. Bealead also have realized seamless joint with the existing ERP system by Sunshell Group.

How the Bealead system help Sunshell to get the actual effect on production transformation? For example, the electronic display board on workshop can reflect the production data, and improve site management efficiency. The administrators can use statements to analyze every workshop, the efficiency of every factory and compare them, in order to motivate enthusiasm, improve the production. The managers of each workshop accurately grasp the production schedule of every contact order; avoid the production problem like exceed the time limit. Automatically collecting quality control data will be convenient for administrators to check the downgrading rate of scrapping for every document. It can realize the data connection of every factory, which can make that there has the data can be checked, and the evidence can be relied on. The realization of the function of “machine repair call out” can reduce the time waste of call the machine repair, and the electric data statement can realize the operation repair condition of every equipment, it is convenient for maintenance.

Figure 3 Status comparison by carrying out new scheme before and after for different workers

Figure 4 the applied data statistics of benefit for Sunshell factory with 5000 workers

The important of production optimization, cost control in the production of clothing is noticeable, especially to the current OEM clothing enterprises. Those two points are good for improving production effectiveness and increasing production effectiveness. When Shangdong Sunshell find the problem, they will use RFID solution with clear aim, which can solve the problem in production management. Actually, like this information transformation, it is not a large factory can carry out. To every clothing enterprises who are seeking for transition and update, the case of Sunshell can be referenced and practiced.