Apparel manufacturing has outdone itself through new techniques such as flash warehousing and global trend reporting. Nowhere are these more evident than the highstreet, where relatively upmarket brands finish off seasons with crowd-pleasing supplies and blitz turnovers. A handful of apparel brands have broken into this segment offering comparable substitutes to designer fantasy fashion, with their global approaches to retail snapping up the most eager markets.
Fast retail in fashion is under pressure to touch off trends and
respond to fickle consumer tastes at the drop of a hat. The method
still keeps a sensitive eye to quality --- clothes never go stale but
they could be menaced by shoddiness down the production line without
material and workmanship uniformity. This is an industry where
information exchange between processes maintains designs and motifs.
The IT connectivity of fashion is one of remarkable
data interchange. Global retailers gather their factories and
warehouses in a single information environment that, although
unimaginable in a highly creative industry, clearly dictates production
standards down to the stitch.
Before coming into its own as an industry that could practice economies
of scale, apparel manufacturing was either small-scale or big in name,
but painstakingly bespoke. Retailers invented customizable uniformity
channeled through ERPs ready for global implementation. Larger and
newer markets dictated more efficient communication platforms across
business processes, culminating in specialized business application
software for fashion.
The enterprise software industry started with generalized products, but
it is aggressively branching out into industry-specific platforms as
manufacturing technologies diverge among businesses. In its more
primitive days of earthier operations, fashion could afford standard
business applications. More specialized versions such as
Infor Fashion,
a suite of applications that covers the entire range of apparel
manufacturing at varying scales, attest to the diverse directions of
business in the fashion industry.
Infor is the third largest provider of enterprise software globally. Its growth, headed by CEO Charles Phillips, is heralded by its invaluable presence in key industries such as aerospace, automotive, food, and healthcare, among others. Visit Infor.com for a background of its increasingly popular ERP in the fashion industry.
