How to Learn ZARA Application Informationization in Clothing Enterprises

Because the garment industry is a labor-intensive industry, the overall informatization started late, so there is a lack of systematic management talents who are familiar with the business model of the garment industry and master information technology, and CIO introduced from outside often has the problem of acclimatization. This is in great contradiction with the strong demand of garment enterprises for information talents. As a Spanish clothing brand, ZARA has become the "darling" of the media since it entered China, and various news and articles about it are also hot. Rapid supply chain is the most important secret of ZARA's success, and the IT system that provides information support for the supply chain naturally contributes. For ZARA, information technology has perfectly demonstrated Spain's design talent. It is through the application of information technology that ZARA can go faster and further, leaving the same type of clothing enterprises far behind. For the garment enterprises in China, the demand for informatization is also growing. With China's clothing industry entering the era of internationalization and brand competition, the enthusiasm of clothing enterprises to use information technology is heating up day by day. Especially for some enterprises that have established their own brands and developed rapidly, with the expansion of enterprise scale, the original manual management system has become increasingly unable to adapt to the development of enterprises, and the decision-making management of enterprises has gradually realized that information construction will become a powerful means to improve the management level and competitiveness of enterprises; Business managers of enterprises are troubled by the inefficiency caused by the manual processing and transmission of a large amount of information, and they also urgently need the informationization of business processing. Driven by this dual demand of management and business, garment enterprises have changed from passive to active in information construction, and enterprise information construction has gradually become a kind of knowledge. Bottom-up VS top-down Under the tide of information construction, various garment enterprises have explored the road of information solutions. Through the case study of many enterprises, AMT Consulting believes that the informatization of garment enterprises can be basically divided into the following two modes: bottom-up: that is, the construction of information systems is local spontaneous, proposed by relevant business departments of enterprises, independently developed or commissioned by IT personnel, tailored according to the enterprise management mode, starting from the most urgent local needs, such as the development of accounting material systems by production departments and a large number of raw materials. The wage system is used for piece-rate wage accounting of workers; The distribution system is used for the purchase, sales and storage management of channels. Most garment enterprises adopt this model, mainly because the management of enterprises tends to be conservative and pragmatic in information construction. At the same time, the informatization of the clothing industry has been lagging behind other industries, so compared with the traditional manufacturing industry, the clothing industry has few solutions in managing the software market. The development and application of this localization has promoted the understanding of informatization in enterprises to a certain extent and played a positive role in the growth stage of enterprises. But with the development of enterprises, it becomes more and more limited. Local construction and decentralized application lead to scattered information and separation of financial services, which cannot effectively support management decisions. At the same time, due to the fragmentation of information construction, it leads to repeated information construction. Top-down: the implementation of large-scale enterprise information systems in an all-round way. Relatively few clothing enterprises adopt this model, and the implementation effect is also that several are happy and several are sad. Some enterprises successfully implemented, while others ended in failure. The reasons for its failure are as follows: first, blindly following, without considering the actual needs of enterprises; Second, the large-scale system requires high standardized management of enterprises, while the clothing industry is a labor-intensive enterprise. The management standardization and informatization level of enterprises are relatively low, and the IT department of enterprises lacks experience in implementing large-scale systems, which has great resistance to implementing informatization in a large area. Looking at the above information construction process of garment enterprises, although the prospect of enterprise information is beautiful and attractive, the road to construction is not smooth sailing. How can garment enterprises promote the benign development of enterprises with the help of information technology, and how can they avoid taking the detour of information technology? AMT Consulting believes that choosing a feasible information construction path is the key to the overall information planning of garment enterprises. At the same time, it is necessary to grasp the key points and difficulties in informatization construction in order to effectively avoid the risks in informatization construction. The information application platform of clothing enterprises can be divided into three types: one is business management platform, which supports the overall business operation of enterprises; The second is internal management and collaborative office platform, which supports internal communication, document management and workflow management. The third is the business decision analysis platform, which is used for business analysis and decision support. Enterprise IT planning is based on business management platform, and business management platform planning must first clarify the strategic positioning of enterprises. This is because the strategic positioning of the enterprise affects the business model of the enterprise. The management of different business models drives different demands for information and data, and the corresponding information and data demands drive the application demand for information systems. Therefore, enterprise IT planning should start from enterprise strategic positioning to build enterprise informatization blueprint, and at the same time, choose the appropriate informatization construction path in combination with enterprise status and business management reform. Positioning focus for clothing enterprises, we must first have a clear positioning focus of our own, and make clear what our main business scope is and where to locate it. Different business scope and positioning have different requirements for informatization, and the strategic blueprint and support focus of informatization are also different. If you are a brand, you need to study consumers, and what are their market segments. With market segmentation, enterprises can have a clear goal for such a segmented consumer group, so as to determine what kind of things should be produced and organize the operation of the whole supply chain. Therefore, for brands, the demand of informatization focuses on market analysis, supporting product planning and managing the whole supply chain from suppliers to channel agents, so the IT blueprint takes the supply chain management system as the core. As a dealer or retailer, we should have a keen sense of the market, grasp the direction of ordering in time, and adjust the promotion strategy in time according to the sales and inventory situation. Therefore, for distributors/retailers, the focus of informatization lies in sales analysis and commodity inventory control, and its IT blueprint takes distribution/retail system as the core. For manufacturers, the main business objectives are timely delivery and cost control. Therefore, the key point of informatization construction lies in purchasing material control and production planning management, and its IT blueprint takes enterprise resource planning (ERP) system as the core. Because many domestic garment enterprises originated from garment processing and production, and then developed with the changes of the market, and experienced many changes such as channel integration and independent brand innovation, most of them developed into an integrated business from market, R&D, production to sales. To support an enterprise's comprehensive business, it needs a variety of information systems such as R&D management, ERP and distribution management. Therefore, information construction has become a top priority. At the same time, with the adjustment of business model and management focus, different enterprises will have different paths of informatization construction. Path Selection Informatization Path selection must first make clear where the core advantages of the enterprise are and in which business areas to improve competitiveness, which is something that management decision makers should collectively think about before enterprise IT planning. If the enterprise takes the self-operated channel as the main advantage and the distribution channel as the core advantage, the information construction can consider starting from the sales front end, choosing the sales terminal as the starting point of information, and then moving towards the information management of the whole supply chain within the enterprise; On the contrary, the core advantage of an enterprise lies in strengthening the optimization and integration of internal resources to improve its responsiveness to the market. Starting with the informatization of internal management, we can improve the standardization and refinement of enterprise management through ERP and other systems. Informatization construction must be based on the stability of enterprise business model. Major management changes and business model adjustments of enterprises will lead to different information needs, thus affecting the application framework of information technology. For example, the transformation of clothing enterprises from traditional functional to multi-brand business division system, the integration of distribution channels and other major organizational changes require re-adjustment and planning of information systems. Therefore, in order to avoid detours in informatization, before informatization construction, we should combine enterprise management reform, fully consider whether the business model and operation process are stable, and then choose the right time. At the same time, before implementing ERP and other large-scale information systems involving the overall situation of enterprises, it is necessary to sort out and optimize the overall process to ensure the successful implementation of the information system. Grasping the key points and tackling the planning is the first step of informatization construction. How to ensure the implementation of IT planning requires a correct understanding of the problems and risks faced by informatization construction. The following analyzes the key points and difficulties of informatization construction of garment enterprises from the aspects of technology, management and resources, so as to help enterprises effectively avoid risks and find countermeasures. First of all, from a technical point of view, garment enterprises have different demands for information solutions because of their industry particularity. Whether these requirements can be met is the key factor to judge whether an information system is suitable for clothing enterprises, so it is necessary to focus on the selection of information systems: generally speaking, products in the clothing industry have multiple attributes, the most typical of which are size and color, which requires that they can be presented in two-dimensional form when entering documents and printing reports. Because mainstream information systems are based on relational databases, the requirements of two-dimensional display are beyond the scope of standard information system functional modules, which also leads to obstacles in transforming system modules that are generally suitable for other manufacturing industries into application solutions for clothing industry. Therefore, it is necessary to adjust the infrastructure and formulate application modules and industry solutions according to the characteristics of the clothing industry. Material code: The raw materials in the clothing industry also contain many attributes, including materials, colors, specifications, etc. However, the same raw materials, due to different purchase batches, often have problems such as color difference. If these attributes are not defined in the system, material management will be chaotic and inventory will be unclear. Therefore, the standardized classification and coding management of materials is the key, and the system needs to provide functions such as color card management and automatic code generation. Matching number management: most footwear products have this requirement, that is, they are mixed in a box according to different size groups. In sales orders, finished goods inventory and delivery, it is necessary to take the matching code as the unit, while in production, it needs to be converted into an even number with a single size. Therefore, the system needs to be able to support the conversion between matching codes and single codes, as well as the unpacking management function that can be split into single codes according to boxes or combined into boxes according to matching codes. Treatment: The product life cycle of clothing enterprises is short and needs to be constantly updated. Every popular season, hundreds of styles will be introduced. Because of the different colors and sizes of the same style, the corresponding product structure and materials will be different. If the BOM is generated according to each SKU (color code) of the general ERP system, the maintenance workload of the BOM is extremely heavy, so the system is required to provide the function of generating BOM in batches according to the style. Order processing: the connection between production and sales is a headache for most manufacturing enterprises, and clothing enterprises are also facing the conversion between sales orders and production orders. Clothing enterprises often adopt the mode of order meeting sales. For this centralized ordering mode, the system is required to automatically summarize orders and decompose large sales orders into production orders that meet production requirements. Performance problem: Due to the huge number of SKUs in clothing enterprises, especially in distribution/retail systems, with the increase of retail terminals, G data will be loaded into products every day, which puts high demands on the response performance of the system. Therefore, when selecting a system, it is necessary to judge whether the system architecture and the selected database can support the corresponding data volume. Secondly, it is necessary to solve the problem of collecting retail terminal data of clothing enterprises from the management aspect. For clothing enterprises, the collection and analysis of terminal data is the baton of product planning, production planning, logistics and marketing policies. Without mastering the information of retail terminals, business decisions of enterprises are like "headless flies", which cannot be targeted. The terminal of clothing enterprises often adopts the form of agency or joining. How to ensure that downstream partners can enjoy the sales data in real time is a problem to be solved from the management mechanism before the implementation of the distribution/retail system. For example, establish a win-win cooperation model, that is, the terminal partner provides retail data, and the clothing enterprise provides sales guidance to the terminal according to the comprehensive analysis results. Finally, it is the lack of informatization talents that makes the informatization construction of many garment enterprises difficult. Because the garment industry is a labor-intensive industry, the overall informatization started late, so there is a lack of systematic management talents who are familiar with the business model of the garment industry and master information technology, and CIO introduced from outside often has the problem of acclimatization. This is in great contradiction with the strong demand of garment enterprises for information talents. On the one hand, garment enterprises should pay more attention to and cultivate compound talents who know both information technology and enterprise management, and seek and cultivate talents from themselves. On the other hand, they can introduce external consultants, and improve their own information project management level and information application level by learning the best practices of the industry and transferring the knowledge and experience of consultants. At the same time, IT outsourcing can also consider making up for the shortage of enterprise information resources. Informatization construction is not achieved overnight. Clothing enterprises need to master the laws of informatization construction and choose the informatization road suitable for enterprises through overall planning.