Lining: "Chain" Becomes A Fast Tailor.

The girl began to try on the new clothes with Lining logo. She would turn around, and her body could become fat or thin at any time.

"The waist should be changed again, or the material on the back will have a little uplift."

The R & D personnel moved the mouse, and the layout and size were quickly determined.

All this is done on the computer, and the girl trying on it is one of the virtual characters of 3D clothing design and try out system developed by Browzwear company.

Lining Foshan research and development center purchased the system last year and began to use it.

The arrival of Browzwear "girl" helped Eddie and his team a lot of work. At least before the order meeting, Browzwear tools greatly reduced the sample fitting time and modified the cost of cutting.

Hongkong Eddie is the director of garment research and development of Li Ning Co.

Before he came to Lining in 2006, he worked in Levi's (Levis) for 16 years, and he took part in or worked for the material department, clothing department, cost control department and so on.

60 days shorter

In March 5, 2008, Xiaotangshan, Beijing, Jiuhua Spa & Resort, Lining autumn order meeting has come to an end, big dealers have finished orders, leaving only three or two small dealers.

Time pushed back more than 260 days, space moved to the Lining research and development center in Foshan street, Eddie, director of clothing R & D development of Li Ning Co, combined with market research information of Beijing headquarters product manager, produced the autumn product planning case.

Then, they began to confirm the product structure and communicate with other designers in the drawing and design. Then, together with the selection of material technology, calculation cost, three sample clothes and sample order, after a series of actions, hundreds of SKU (that is, the smallest available unit of stock) was punctual out of the order meeting.

From the total planning to the order meeting, after the consideration of cost, manufacturing process and so on, after the selection of the order meeting, about 40% of the initial design will eventually become the finished product, appearing on the market.

During this period, Lining's COO Guo Jianxin will participate in the two election and the three selection, and the sales system staff, distributors and their buyers will confirm which products are the main selling and how much they can sell.

After that, the order will be handed over to the processing plants.

At present, Eddie is trying to shorten the whole process from 260 days to 200 days. He hopes to achieve this goal next year.

His plan is to complete the existing raw materials laboratory, and the materials and processes in all aspects can be carried out step by step in screening, and no longer will be selected between the suppliers of raw materials.

In addition, the computer system such as 3D stereoscopic fitting is used to reduce unnecessary time wastage.

This is also a link of Guo Jianxin's "market sensitive supply chain" put forward by Mr. Guo Jianxin in 2004. He has always wanted to establish a real market oriented supply chain of value chains.

In this "market sensitive supply chain", Lining needs to integrate cotton mill, cloth mill, garment processing plant, logistics provider, distributor and distributor.

In short, light self production operation.

The operation of light assets is really nothing new.

The success of Nike in the last century is the best footnote of "market push and operation mode of virtual production".

However, the core of this is how to effectively organize brand design centers, raw materials suppliers, manufacturers, warehouses, distribution centers and channel traders under the brand pull. That is to say, how to optimize supply chain management (SCM) in order to achieve the lowest cost and the highest efficiency.

Supply chain faces: no difference in raw materials

In the fabric Laboratory of Lining R & D center in Foshan, apart from numerous buttons, badges, zippers and so on, the most conspicuous is the wall of dozens of fabric suppliers provided by the lab wall, which fills up about ten rooms, including the fabric provided by the "Leica" brand, which is one of Lining's partners since 2002.

The selection of fabrics often starts at the initial stage of design and development. For some fabrics that need to show future sense or have some functional design, fabrics with special properties are important factors to consider in the design process.

Lining's designers will tell their suppliers about their requirements and recommend them.

After talking to the Chinese national diving team (one of Lining's sponsorship teams) many times, Wu Baolian decided to buy an extremely expensive fabric from abroad. "At that time, the other side carefully held a small piece of fabric, explaining it for two hours, like holding a small piece of gold, but it was really expensive."

Wu laughs that she is a senior designer of Lining design center in Hongkong. This fabric can meet the requirements of light, impermeable, good ductility and beauty.

Ying Wei Da recommended several special Lycra craft fabrics to Lining, such as the Lycra fabric made of natural extract microcapsule. When it rubbed, it had aloe, lavender and other scent. It had a soothing long-term effect and used as an athlete's daily uniforms. These technologies were successfully developed in the past one or two years.

"Lining's plan is very good. The Olympic products began to talk a year ago, and the big products (mass consumer products) started talking six or seven months ago. They will negotiate with us about the price, tell us how much raw material we need, and which cooperative factories we provide."

Song Jianhui, director of marketing, is so critical of his partners.

As a matter of fact, Lining now starts to provide important material partners to their market research results on fabrics.

Workers: opening "green channel"

From the raw material dealer designated by Lining, when the materials were purchased at a specified price and time, the machine in the 3 factory building of Yusheng (Taicang) footwear factory in Jiangsu began to run, producing Lining's sports shoes.

In Taicang, Yusheng has a total of five buildings, not much, at least with its parent company, the world's largest shoemaking kingdom, Yuyuan Industrial Group (Hongkong), which is only a small cheese.

Yuyuan, which is distributed in different parts of the world, is constantly producing sports brand shoes such as Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Puma, CONVERSE and so on.

Yusheng's shoes account for about 30% of Lining's sports shoes, but it's not just OEM (original equipment manufacturer), but ODM (original design manufacturer).

Lining had considered putting Li Ninggong, one of Lining's patents, into the front toe of her heel to make her bow shoes.

Xiong Xinmin, Vice Minister of Yusheng, recalls that after the designer put forward the plan, he has been researching and developing for more than a year before he can find a feasible process.

You can't see too many shoe R & D personnel in Foshan R & D center. Many of them are stationed in various processing plants to solve the above process problems.

In 2005, TOYOTA started to learn the lean management mode of Yusheng. Now a pair of shoes can be completed within 1 hours, and the efficiency is doubled.

"Fast tracking, there is no warehouse in the middle, and what is previously manufactured is stored in a certain link."

The reason why Xiong Xinmin is so quick to generalize is that although there are seventy or eighty parts on one shoe and more than 300 processes are needed, it is very complicated.

Yongda Garment Co., Ltd., located in Shunde, is a manufacturer of Lining garments.

Wing Da is also growing fast.

Guo Jianxin said that Yongda has been able to complete the production of single parts, which he called "single piece flow". A complete garment can be produced in about more than 40 minutes.

At the same time, there is also a fast response, and three water Guangdong Lining Sports Development Co., Ltd. (Sanshui company) - the only wholly owned Li Ning Co production base.

The small and slightly outdated five storey building of Sanshui company received the first quick response order in July 2007, with only a few hundred clothes.

The products on the order are subject to market reaction and customers demand temporary increase.

According to the normal process flow, the production of these clothes takes about two weeks, and under the quick reaction mechanism, it can be completed in 7 days.

The key to speed up is in the production line, cutting bed, sewing, QCQA inspection and so on all processes are priority, compressing the waiting time between various links.

This is an important point in TOYOTA's production mode to reduce unnecessary spare parts inventory.

In a total of 21 production lines, the Sanshui factory has retained two flexible production lines, because new temporary orders are coming up almost every week. These production lines can change plans at any time and postpone the daily bulk orders, as if building a "green channel".

Having their own production capacity can increase the elasticity of the supply chain and have a quick response to the temporary market demand.

In Lining's 2007 annual report, the column "human resources" indicates that the number of employees has increased this year, mainly in line with the development of the clothing sample technology and supply chain rapid reaction center in Guangdong, and has added a large number of technology and production personnel.

This is precisely because the rapid response of the order pattern changes more, workers skill requirements, and the number of personnel is also relatively increased.

Logistics: start straight hair

In 2005, on the basis of the original sensitive supply chain, Guo Jianxin began to further reduce the supply chain. He made a very clear instruction: the hardware input of the logistics stopped, and instead, he sought for the third party logistics partners.

In the same year, Lining has built two production bases in Beijing and Guangzhou, and the Shanghai base built after 2005 is actually the base of third party logistics providers for Lining.

Now, "from Yu Sheng and other factories finished products to the base warehouse, the longest is 2 hours".

However, Guo Jianxin is still planning to let storage fees drop further, and docking with dealers is more accurate.

"When retailers want to know what kind of goods they want, how much they want and where to go, and when these information reaches our logistics department, we can tell the third party logistics providers which factories to ship and how much quantity they need to distribute."

That would be Guo Jianxin's idea.

In 2008, Lining began experimenting with direct logistics projects.

Before the factory finished, Lining had to go to the base warehouse, and then Lining was sent to the dealer again.

Now, directly from the factory to the dealer.

These need to connect Lining's ERP to the partner port, thus forming a system of SCM..

Partners are indispensable.

Also in 2005, Lining pulled all the suppliers to TOYOTA, Japan.

Before going to Japan, Guo Jianxin asked them to "string around the door", to make clothes to see how to make shoes, to make shoes to see fabrics, "after reading, they found that the entire supply chain has so many things."

This causes them to have problems and doubts in their minds.

Then they were dragged to TOYOTA to learn the lean production mode of TOYOTA.

After returning home, experts were asked to teach in Tsinghua University.

How to react quickly?

Therefore, Guo Jianxin, who is rather fond of "systematicness", calls Lining "a center and an integrator of information".

However, he also clearly knows that, as early as 1999, Lining had introduced the AFS clothing and footwear solutions from SAP company, and set up a complete set of ERP system inside the company. However, the system can not monitor every part of the process, and the existing OA (office automation) system and sales service system can only complete part of the monitoring.

"The only thing we lack is the PLM (product lifecycle management) system, which is used in the product development and R & D, and is still using Excel or Project separate streams.