Fabritex: Key Features and Strategy Analysis

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Table of Contents

Analysis
Key Order-winners and Order-qualifiers for the Pearlwear Business
How Operations Support the Needs of Pearlwear Business
Reference List

Analysis

Fabritex is a vertically integrated subsidiary of the Wardman Group that produces fine cloth for both fashion and industrial use. The company has also diversified into engineering, furniture, and finishing products. Its core business is supplying knit fabrics – either branded or non-branded – for lingerie. Fabritex supplies these products to multiple segments but aims to grow its current share of 14% in the Pearlwear business, a premium brand, particularly in its UK factory. The main threat to this corporate goal is the recurrent failure to meet its agreed delivery dates, which forces Pearlwear to revise its production programs. On the other hand, Fabritex loses its market share to rivals that can supply within shorter promise dates.

The failed deliveries can be attributed to various causes, which Fabritex must address to realize its growth goals. The ordered pattern for particular fabrics may not be predicted with certainty, affecting product availability. As expected, Fabritex would minimize inventory to hold down costs and avoid stock obsolescence (Szwejczewski, Sweeney & Cousens 2015). The firm requires a solution for downstream management of inventories. A vendor-managed inventory program can help forecast, plan, and replenish raw materials based on point-of-sale data at minimal costs (Heizer, Render & Munson 2016).

Erratic demand and losses due to higher knitting machine set-up or changeover time also affect Fabritex’s capacity to meet its delivery promises. In addition, its knitting and dying plants are 12 miles apart, which complicates logistics even further. To address these weaknesses, a marketing strategy is proposed to enhance communication at all levels and ensure a quick and consistent response to orders.

Key Order-winners and Order-qualifiers for the Pearlwear Business

In the current competitive market, company strategies must be customer-centric. Firms have to offer low prices, high quality, innovative designs, and fast and reliable delivery to compete in the marketplace (Slack & Lewis 2017). A corporate strategy gives a sense of direction that helps achieve competitive gains on these fronts. Order-qualifiers refer to the minimum criteria for a product to be saleable in the market, while order-winners are the additional features that influence customers to pick a brand over others (Hill & Hill 2017). Both represent a dynamic response to competition or changing customer tastes. The current Fabritex order winners and qualifiers are tabulated below.

Table 1: Order-qualifiers and Winners for the Pearlwear Business.

Order winners	Order qualifiers
UK lingerie warp knit – branded segment	UK lingerie warp knit – non branded segment
Quality Knowledge of Pearlwear’s specifications Pearlwear’s commitment to work closely with Fabritex to improve processes Delivery speed Achieve shorter delivery lead times Delivery reliability A scheduling system to manage orders and meet quantity requirements Skilled staff to complete set-up and changeover in time	Availability of new fabrics Current fabrics are nearing the end of their life cycle. Thus, there is an opportunity for Fabritex to gain £1.2 million of market share by supplying products presently under development. High-performance fabrics The new products must be attractive and perform well Quality conformance Working with Pearlwear’s designers will guarantee Fabritex a deal to supply production fabric Meeting specific customer demands Price Offering attractive prices to capture the market share

How Operations Support the Needs of Pearlwear Business

Operations strategy

Fabritex’s operations strategies for production, inventory and supply chain management, and marketing are critical to its success.
Specific decision areas reflect the organization’s priorities in meeting the needs of the Pearlware business.

Product design

This decision area focuses on efficiency and cost-effectiveness in meeting customer’s orders (Bhattacharya, Dey & Ho 2015).
Fabritex must produce quality fabrics that meet Pearlwear’s specifications in terms of variety and style.
The operations function addresses the design of products by using two knitting machine types – warp and weft – that give distinctive fabric characteristics.
The knitted fabrics or greiges require different times to complete depending on size and design. For example, a 250-meter product takes 140.8 hours to knit.

Quality management

Manufacturers must meet retailer-defined quality expectations to be competitive in their industry (Agrawal & Smith 2015).
Knitting machine set-up or changeover by skilled staff is one area of operation that helps guarantee the quality of Fabritex’s fabrics in line with Pearlwear’s specifications.
The dyeing step is also managed well by cleaning the machine every time a new greige is loaded for specific color sequences.
About 10% of the dyed fabrics are re-dyed to ensure that they are of suitable quality and inspection of the product is done before delivery.

Process and capacity design

Continuous monitoring of production capacities serves as a basis for increasing human resources or equipment to meet changing demand (Kouvelis & Tian 2014).
Fabritex’s operations function monitors knitting and dyeing loads for Pearlwear business to determine areas to improve.
For example, it takes between 41.1 and 578.3 hours to knit fabrics ranging from 74 and 2600 meters in size.
Some of the dye plant’s capacity (four units) is reserved for customers outside the Wardman Group.

Location strategy

This decision area focuses on the efficiency of logistics to reduce lead times and delays in achieving customer orders (Jung, Lee & White 2015).
Fabritex’s dye plant is located only 12 miles away from the knitting factory.
Thus, the dyed fabric can be shipped to the knitting factory for inspection and finishing, ensuring on-time delivery to Pearlware.
The strategic location of the two plants reduces the period from dyeing to delivery to six days.
The facility is partly dedicated to processing fabric for the firm’s customers.

Human resources

Maintaining standardized job processes is an important operations strategy for ensuring quality products (Slack, Brandon-Jones & Johnston 2016).
Fabritex has skilled staff to perform set-up and changeover of knitting machines, cutting down the time requirements to about four hours. Thus, it can handle higher orders from Pearlware.
Adequate human resources ensure that the machines are manned 24-hours daily, five days a week. Sometimes overtime during weekends is possible when orders are many.
Loading the greige into the beams and cleaning the dyeing machine (takes two hours) requires skilled staff to maintain high capacity.
The dye plant is operational 24 hours daily, four days a week – adequate staff is required.

Supply chain (SC) management

SC is a network utilized to deliver products/services from raw materials to customers (Chae, Olson & Sheu 2014,). The goal is to supply at optimal capacity, speed, and flexibility.
Investing in flexible processes in sourcing, multisite operations, and logistics practice can help achieve a strategic fit with corporate goals (Barnes 2018).
Fabritex’s fabrics are manufactured on order.
The delivery date is issued based on available expertise on the fabric and raw material as well as present knitting loads.
Thus, by streamlining its SCs, Fabritex will be able to meet Pearlwear’s demand.

Inventory management

Maintaining lower inventory is a cost-minimization measure (Thomas et al. 2015)
Orders for greige or finished fabrics are monitored to avoid overproducing knitted fabric that would be sold at lower prices
The inventory levels are maintained based on data from the marketing department.

Scheduling

The goal is to optimize internal process schedules to reduce losses due to excess capacity (Soosay et al. 2015).
Fabritex has a scheduling system for order management.
New orders are scheduled and the delivery promise date is determined based on past completion time for knitting and dyeing.
For example, the promise date for a sample order from Pearlwear of Black 1 shade (424m in size) was week 18 but it was delivered in week 20.

Additional Information

Inventory management – A vendor-managed inventory model would indicate that Fabritex forecasts, plans, and replenishes raw materials based on greige or finished fabric orders (Slack & Lewis 2017). Allowing access to real-time point-of-sale data of its customers can help Fabritex to maintain optimal inventory levels and minimize costs consistent with the principles of just-in-time delivery (Bhattacharya, Cheffi & Dey 2016).
Logistics – The integration of online information systems into logistics would show the efficiency of the operations function.
The greige batch size that must be reached before dyeing can be done – potential delays may lead to missed delivery dates.
Forecasting models used by Fabritex’s marketing department to place orders for greige in anticipation of demand spikes. Data on the unwanted greige stock can give an idea of the reliability of these approaches.
Sourcing of the raw materials – Understanding the capacity of Fabritex’s suppliers to meet high demand is important. Additionally, it would be useful to know the level of vertical integration in this firm, as it will give an idea of how fast Fabritex can respond to customer’s orders.
The number and frequency of orders from customers other than Pearlwear. Additionally, their target markets or segments will help predict demand (Kistruck et al. 2015).

Reference List

Agrawal, N & Smith, SA (eds) 2015, Retail supply chain management: quantitative models and empirical studies, 2nd edn, Springer, New York, NY.

Barnes, D 2018, Operations management: an international perspective, Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Bhattacharya, A, Cheffi, W & Dey, P 2016, ‘Recent advances in manufacturing operations’, Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 102-114.

Bhattacharya, A, Dey, PK & Ho, W 2015, ‘Green manufacturing supply chain design and operations decision support’, International Journal of Production Research, vol. 53, no. 21, pp. 6339-6343.

Chae, BK, Olson, D & Sheu, C 2014, ‘The impact of supply chain analytics on operational performance: a resource-based view’, International Journal of Production Research, vol. 52, no. 16, pp. 4695–4710.

Heizer, J, Render, B & Munson, C 2016, Operations management, 12th edn, Pearson, New York, NY.

Hill, T & Hill, A 2017, Operations strategy: design, implementation and delivery, Red Globe Press, London.

Jung, H, Lee, CG & White, CC 2015, ‘Socially responsible service operations management: an overview’, Annals of Operations Research, vol. 230, no. 1, pp. 1-16.

Kistruck, GM, Morris, SS, Webb, JW & Stevens, CE 2015, ‘The importance of client heterogeneity in predicting make-or-buy decisions’, Journal of Operations Management, vol. 33, pp. 97-110.

Kouvelis, P & Tian, Z 2014, ‘Flexible capacity investments and product mix: optimal decisions and value of postponement options’, Production and Operations Management, vol. 23, no. 5, pp. 861-876.

Slack, N, Brandon-Jones, A & Johnston, R 2016, Operations management, Pearson, New York, NY.

Slack, N & Lewis, M 2017, Operations strategy, 5th edn, Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.

Soosay, C, Nunes, B, Bennett, D, Sohal, A, Jabar, J & Winroth, M, 2015, ‘Strategies for sustaining manufacturing competitiveness: comparative case studies in Australia and Sweden’, Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 6-37.

Szwejczewski, M, Sweeney, M & Cousens, A 2015, ‘The strategic management of manufacturing networks’, Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 124-149.

Thomas, A, Byard, P, Francis, M, Fisher, R & White, G 2015, ‘Profiling the resiliency and sustainability of UK manufacturing companies’, Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 82-99.

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