A fitting solution

Twenty years ago, mail order retailers published catalogues twice a year. But spring/summer and autumn/winter tomes no longer suffice in the days of fast fashion and internet retailing, so mail order must move with the times.

One business that’s taken such a journey is JD Williams, the fast-growing home shopping retailer and part of the N Brown Group. At any one time, JD Williams has 13 billion catalogue pages, 8,000 lines and 120,000 SKUs. These are sold through more than 700 catalogues a year, 1,600 press offers and 45 web sites.

The production of these routes to market alone is a mammoth task. Add in the fact that 80 per cent of what’s sold is own label and the complexity of the operation and project management required becomes substantial.

The retailer had relied on experienced staff, numerous systems and ad-hoc processes to keep the operation running. But, during the past 12 months, it has implemented a product lifecycle management system from TradeStone Software to bring visibility and order to the buying and merchandising department.

JD Williams buying and merchandising director Paul Short explains: “One of the greatest strengths of our business is its complexity. But, with the speed of change in the market in the past 10 years, we were stretched with our existing buying processes.”

Short says the business’s success has come from pinpointing niches in the market and exploiting them. “We are not bothered about being mass market,” he says. One of these niches is outsize clothing: about 50 per cent of JD Williams’ total womenswear sales are for size 20-plus clothing. However, Short says that to cater for this sizeable niche the retailer has had to rely on own-brand clothing developed in-house, because other clothing brands did not want to get involved.

The retailer has also recognised both the opportunities and challenges it faces from the internet. 30 per cent of sales now come from its web sites and it wants to increase this figure to 50 per cent within two years. However, the catalogues are still important for driving sales because, in many cases, the internet is purely an ordering vehicle.

To this end, JD Williams embarked on an end-to-end supply chain initiative in 2005. It also wanted to identify a plan of action that would take the business forward. Short says: “After 18 months of change, it was clear that we needed to review our IT systems and join up the supply chain that we had put together.

“Few of the existing systems talked to each other. Everyone was doing their own spreadsheets and inaccuracy and time-wasting was becoming evident.”

Critical situation

Each of the 700 catalogue offers has its own “critical path” – the timeline that runs from when product concepts are discussed to when the stock that is created is allowed to sell through. Short says that, at any one time, there were stacks of critical paths being worked on and no overview of where his team had got to with any of them. “We were too reliant on the knowledge of a few individuals,” he adds.

JD Williams sought outside professional help to make the decision on what kind of system it needed and product lifecycle management fitted the bill.

Despite the massive lack of visibility, Short was against introducing a product lifecycle management system initially. However, he was slowly swayed once he realised how it could provide a consistent platform for staff to work from, as well as increasing productivity.

Eventually, TradeStone Software was chosen. Even then, it took a long time to build a business case for the introduction of the system, because the retailer operates a mainframe computer and prefers to build applications in-house.

So Short has had to be realistic about which modules could be implemented in the short-term and which bits of functionality he will have to wait longer for. He says: “TradeStone gave us between 70 and 80 per cent of what we wanted out of the box, but we knew we could develop the system further to get this up to 85 per cent and then make it fit better further down the line.”

Originally, he wanted the sourcing and purchase-order modules, with JD Williams developing a quality-control module in-house. However, plans for the purchase-order module had to be put on hold after Short was told that it would take years to integrate it with legacy systems.

The delivery of the sourcing module was in the first phase of the development and has been rolled out to 20 key suppliers and the whole of the buying team. The system is web-based, so it can be accessed by JD Williams’ and suppliers’ staff via a web browser.

TradeStone chief executive Sue Welch explains how the system provides best practice – always monitoring the cost and profit possible on each garment as design and production decisions are made. For instance, just before production commences, the neckline on a garment that was first designed two months ago might be changed.

JD Williams is working on the development of its autumn/winter 2008 collections using the system and Short has been surprised at how easy his Chinese suppliers have found it to use.

Welch explains that TradeStone assumed that it would never get the chance to train users within international suppliers, so it designed the system to be simple and straightforward to use. She explains: “If I am a supplier in China, I see the system in my language, timezone and currency, and it shows me what I need to do. So we have not had to do any training.”

The resulting system has allowed Short to demand more from his suppliers, giving them improved access to information so that they can perform better. “You can develop products much more quickly when the brief is standard and you can push suppliers to develop products more quickly,” he says.

“I wanted to crack the 20 per cent of suppliers that we do 80 per cent of our business with. I can push them to improve, because I can compare them with each other.”

The second phase of the project involves the introduction of a quality-management module developed jointly by JD Williams and TradeStone. It has been designed to reduce the costs incurred during fit evaluations and the sampling process by advancing the quality of products and reducing the number of fits needed for each item.

Getting the perfect fit is an essential part of JD Williams’s proposition. “Our clothes are designed to provide the best fit at the best value,” explains Short. “When dealing with larger sizes, fit is very important. If the quality and fit of the garments are good, we will have fewer returns, which increases our profits and, more importantly, provides us with a happier customer base. By getting the fit right the first time around, we save significant time and money and build customer loyalty. TradeStone helps us do that.”

The quality-management module has also allowed JD Williams to enhance the accuracy and accountability of sample measurement, reduce turnaround times for samples and maintain a more accurate sample history online. Suppliers understand what is expected of them and can self-audit the samples at the source before shipping them across the world.

In addition, the product lifecycle management system has allowed the company to increase the number of collections it produces each year and improve the timelines for internet-only products.

“I can see what’s happening with critical paths and have about eight in the system at the moment. We also have a critical path for fast fashion that is six weeks long for products going on the internet,” adds Short.

He expects to see many further benefits over the next few years. “In the end, I will have better-targeted ranges and will be able to create better sales growth. There are also margin opportunities working with suppliers,” he says.

Although JD Williams may not be a fashion leader, the results it expects from this system implementation will surely make it a retailer that others follow.