Friday, August 8, 2008

Supply Chain Practices of Three European Apparel Companies: Zara, H&M and Benetton

Hennes & Mauritz
· Sweden based – founded by Erling Persson
· Though compared to its competitor Zara, H&M took more time to deliver the clothes, the extra time gave the company a cost advantage and clothes were 30-50% cheaper compared to those at Zara.
· Stocks are replenished every day and no item was allowed in shelf for more than a month.
· Clothes were designed by H&M and mfg by 600 suppliers located in 22 countries across the world to be shipped to more than 1300 stores spread in 25 countries across the world.
Design
· All of H&M’s collection are planned and designed centrally by the company’s purchase and design department. The department had over 100 in house designers and cooperation from around 100 buyers and 50 pattern designers.
· The design was based by balancing three parameters namely fashion, quality and price.
· Every year H&M brought out two main collections, one during the spring and one during the autumn season. Within each season, several sub-collections are released.
· H&M also brought out collections in collaboration with renowned designers of the world
Production
· H&M did now own any factories or manufacturing units, and clothes were procured from more than 700 independent suppliers.
· The main responsibilities of production office included identifying new suppliers, placing orders with the right suppliers, negotiating price, ensuring suppliers maintained quality, minimizing transport time etc.
· H&M essentially operated through two supply chains in order to optimize time and cost. The first chain took care of the cost component and the manufacturing was done mainly in Asian countires. The second one termed ‘rapid reaction’ was used for fashion sensitive garments, and was based in Europe.

Distribution
· The production was sent to warehouses which act as transit terminal.
· The merchandise is delivered to store in daily shipments.
· The goods from the Asian countries were shipped by sea in order to minimize costs. When the orders from a particular store were large, the shipment was sent directly to stores. If the garments were in demand only in a particular country, then they were sent directly to the distribution centre in that country.
· All the H&M stores were managed by the company and operated in the best available locations.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Supply Chain Practices of Three European Apparel Companies: Zara, H&M and Benetton

The case details the design, production and distribution practices of following three companies:
Zara: One of the pioneers of fast fashion developed a fully integrated supply chain model. The processes like design, production and distribution were carried in-house and it owned and operated all the stores.
Hennes & Mauritz: Designed & distributed the garments, and owned the stores, while the manufacturing was completely outsourced.
Benetton: designed and manufactured all the garments, but did now own any stores.

ZARA
· Three key success factors – short lead time, more style and low supply of any particular style.
· Zara – the flagship brand of Spain based Inditex group, founded by Amancio Ortega Gaona and opened its first store in 1975.
· 1058 stores located in 69 countries as of March ‘08
· Able to conceptualize the garment, develop, and deliver it to the stores within 2-3 weeks weres the industry average is six months.
· Key to success – integration of design, production, distribution, and retailing
· The model allowed Zara to respond quickly to shifts in consumer tastes and to newly emerging trends.
· The company's instant fashion model, which completely rotated its retail stock every two weeks, also encouraged customers to return often to its stores, with delivery day becoming known as "Z-day" in some markets. The knowledge that clothing items would not be available for very long also encouraged shoppers to make their purchases more quickly.
· In 1988, the company opened its first foreign store in Oporto, Portugal.
· If a design doesn't sell well within a week, it is withdrawn from shops, further orders are cancelled and a new design is pursued. No design stays on the shop floor for more than four weeks, which encourages Zara fans to make repeat visits. An average high-street store in Spain expects customers to visit three times a year. That goes up to 17 times for Zara.
· While most retailers try to forecast the fashion trend and produce accordingly, Zara moves with the customer requirements and does not have to depend on forecast.

Design
· The design centre was located in Spain as well and was divided into three segments for Men, Women and Child wear.
· Team consisted of more than 200 designers who can churn out 60 styles each.
· The store managers and sales staff updated the head office every day about the moving stock and provided inputs regarding the new lines, colors, styles and fabrics that customers are demanding.
· The store specialists provided the designers with an outline of the new style, design and fabric as demanded by the store. The procurement and production managers provided inputs regarding the capacity and manufacturing costs. The designers came out with the design specifications and the technical brief. With all the teams working in tandem, the prototypes were ready within a few hours!!

Production
· Zara procures unprocessed and undyed fabric and colored the product based on the need. Zara sourced undyed fabric from far east, Morocco and India.
· The prototype is made by design team.
· The production facility cuts the fabrics as per the required design using computer layout of sample pieces. The layout was prepared to minimize wastage.
· The cut-pieces were barcoded and marked and were then distributed for sewing to 350 small workshops in Spain and Portugal where almost 60% of production happens. These workshops, which were not owned by Zara, employed about 11,000 workers and were provided with a set of instructions on how to sew the garments. This helps keep cost down. Quality was assured by maintaining proper training and audit.
· Garments are usually ready in a weeks time.
· The stitched garments after coming to the production centers of Zara were checked twice for quality, pressed, tagged, wrapped in plastic bags and sent to the distribution centers.

Distribution
· Distribution centre (5lac sq meter) is located centrally in Spain.
· Zara has its own railway track of 211 km on which the goods moved to the distribution centre.
· Optical reading devices sorts out more than 60,000 items every hour. The distribution centre has two level and was fully automated. On one level, folded apparel was packed into cardboard boxes. The boxes were dropped through a shaft according to their destination. On the lower level, garments – sorted based on their styles – were placed on hangers. There were two belt systems – one for folded and one for hung garments. The garments were then routed using automated routing devices. All the garments were pre-priced and the lots labeled according to their destination.
· The garments were shipped out twice a week.
· Non-european consignments were sent to the airport for further distribution.
· Stores within Europe receives consignment within 24-36 hrs wereas outside Europe received them within two days.
· Zara achieved accuracy of 98.9% in its shipments.
· Once the merchandise reaches the stores, the goods were put on display straight away. With new stocks arriving twice a week, the stores always had something new to offer and the customers waited eagerly for new arrivals.
· The codes on the clothes conveyed to the staff where exactly the items needed to be placed. In the stores, the clothes were organized by color rather than type of garments. This was done in order to encourage customers to spend more time at the stores matching items.
· The stores were mostly located in the prime locations across the world.
· All Zara stores were uniform in outlay, including lighting, fixtures, window display and arrangement of garments.
· Most of the stores were company-owned and in some markets, particularly in Asia, Zara went in for alliance and franchises.
· Zara retained the right to open its own stores in the location and buy out franchised operations in cast the franchise experienced any problems with running the stores.

Zara’s supply chain - advantages and disadvantages:
· Zara was able to react swiftly to the emerging trend in the fashion industry. In contrast, other retailer took between 8 to 12 months to forecast and arrive at a style and send it for production.
· If the style did not sell as expected, the low production quantity ensured that Zara did not lose much, as there was not much stock to be discounted. On an average, Zara sold only 18% of the clothes through discount sales twice a year, as against the industry average of 36% and constant markdowns.
· Though this supply chain of Zara has higher cost but it allowed Zara the advantage of low inventory and higher profit margins. Analysts opined that Zara’s supply chain did not minimize costs, but worked towards maximizing revenues.
· The biggest disadvantage with Zara is that since Zara owned all the channels of supply chain, it was difficult for Zara to expand to far location as it becomes very costly to distribute such products.

(The supply chain practices of H&M and Benetton will follow in my next article…soon!!)

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

The Bullwhip Effect in Supply Chain

(The article is a summary from the paper written by Hau L. Lee, V. Padmanabhan and Seungjin Whang and taken from sloan management review/spring 1997)

Distorted information from one end of a supply chain to the other can lead to tremendous inefficiencies excessive inventory investment, poor customer service, lost revenues, misguided capacity plans, ineffective transportation, and missed production schedules. The article deals with how do exaggerated order swings occur? What can companies do to mitigate them?

Summary
The bullwhip effect results from rational decision making by members in the supply chain. Companies can effectively conteract the effect by thoroughly understanding its underlying causes. Industry leaders like P&G are implementing innovative strategies that pose new challenges: integrating new information system, defining new organizational relationships, and implementing new incentive and measurement systems. The choice for companies is clear: either let the bullwhip effect paralyze you or find a way out.

What is Bullwhip effect in supply chain?
This effect first came to my knowledge while my professor was of SCM was trying to teach us the reason for extremely high inventory by making us play the ‘Beer Game’. Here each of the four participants are given the role of ‘retailer’, ‘wholesaler’, ‘distributor’ and ‘manufacturer’. The retailer is randomly given a customer demand based on which the retailer try to forecast future demand and gives the order to wholesaler with some built in ‘safety stock’. Now as the process moves upward, from wholesaler to distributor to manufacturer, to my utter surprise, even if all the decision seems perfectly rational the inventory kept on increasing at each level. You will not believe the end result, the retailers fluctuation in demand only varied from some 8 to 16 over a period of 24 turns (that we played) and the total inventory and total backorder in entire supply chain was running in excess of 2000!!!
This is what is called ‘Bullwhip effect’. Here are some of the real life examples of this effect in play. It was observed by executives of P&G that the sales patterns for one of their best-selling products pampers fluctuates in retail stores, but the variabilities were certainly not excessive. However, as they examined the distributor’s orders, the degree of variability increased. When they further looked at P&G’s orders of materials to their suppliers, such as 3M, they discovered that the swings were even greater. This did not make sense. While the consumers, in this case the babies, consumed diapers at a steady rate, the demand order variabilities in the supply chain were amplified as they moved up the supply chain. This effect is called the bullwhip effect / whiplash effect / whipsaw effect.
As per wiki, the bullwhip effect is because customer demand is rarely perfectly stable, businesses must forecast demand in order to properly position inventory and other resources. Forecasts are based on statistics, and they are rarely perfectly accurate. Because forecast errors are a given, companies often carry an inventory buffer called "safety stock". Moving up the supply chain from end-consumer to raw materials supplier, each supply chain participant has greater observed variation in demand and thus greater need for safety stock. In periods of rising demand, down-stream participants will increase their orders. In periods of falling demand, orders will fall or stop in order to reduce inventory. The effect is that variations are amplified as one moves upstream in the supply chain (further from the customer)
In short, Bullwhip effect is the magnification of demand fluctuations, not the magnification of the demand. This could be really costly to any company.

(The beer game could be made available on request. If required, please send a mail to akshat1604@gmail.com with subject line “request for beer game”. The game is also available online…just try to google a bit!!)

Consequence of Bullwhip Effect
· Excessive inventory quantities : Various studies have found that the total supply chain, from when products leave the manufacturers production lines to when they arrive on the retailers shelves, has more than 100 days of inventory supply. Also, various reports estimates a potential $30 billion opportunity from streamlining the inefficiencies of the grocery supply chain.
· Poor customer service
· Lost revenue
· Unsatisfactory quality
Causes of Bullwhip Effect
People generally believe that the amplified order variability is the case cause of players irrationally decision making within the supply chain’s infrastructure. On the contrary, the fact is that bullwhip effect is the consequence of rational behavior of various players involved in the supply chain. This implies that the companies should try to modify the chains infrastructure and related processes rather than the decision makers behavior.
· Demand forecast updating: Forecasting is often based on order history from the company’s immediate customers. When a downstream operation places an order, the upstream manager processes the piece of information as a signal about future demand. Based on this forecast, the upstream manager readjusts his or her demand forecast and, in turn, the order placed with the suppliers of the upstream operation. This demand signal processing is the major contributor to the bullwhip effect. It is intuitive that, when the lead times between the resupply of the items along the supply chain are longer, the fluctuations is even more significant

· Order batching: There are two forms of order batching, a) Periodic ordering and b) Push ordering. Instead of ordering frequently, companies may order weekly, biweekly, or even monthly. The order batching is generally done to minimize the cost of ordering or to use the economies of transportation. This causes sudden increase in demand of the product thereby amplifying variability. For companies, the ordering pattern from their customers is more erratic than the consumption patterns that their customer experience. However, if all customers order cycles were spread out evenly throughout the ordering cycle, the bullwhip effect would be minimal. The periodic surges in demand by some customers would be insignificant because not all would be ordering at the same time. Unfortunately, such an ideal situation rarely exists. Orders are more likely to be overlapping towards let say end of the month or year. As a result, the surge of demand is even more pronounced, and the variability from the bull-whip effect is at its highest.

· Price fluctuations: Manufacturers and distributors periodically have special promotions like price discounts, quantity discounts, rebates etc. All these promotions results in price fluctuations. The result is that customers buy in quantities that do not reflect their immediate needs; they buy in bigger quantities and stock up for the future. The problem is it could be costly if forward buying becomes the norm? When a products price is low (due to offers), a customer buys in bigger quantities then needed. When the products price return to normal, the customer stops buying until it has depleted its inventory. As a result, the customer’s buying pattern does not reflect its consumption pattern, and the variation of the buying quantities is much bigger than the variation in the consumption rate – the bullwhip effect. This practice of giving regular discounts is sometimes called ‘the dumbest marketing ploy ever’.

· Rationing and shortage gaming: When product demand exceeds supply, the manufacturers often ration its product to customers. Generally, the manufacturer allocates the amount in proportion to the amount ordered. Knowing that the manufacturer will ration when the product is in short supply, customers exaggerate their real needs when they order. Later, when demand cools, order will suddenly disappear and cancellation pours in. In short, the customers try to ‘game’ the rationing system adopted by the seller. The effect of ‘gaming’ is that customers orders give the supplier little information on the products real demand, a particularly vexing problem for manufacturers in a products earlier stages.
How to counteract the Bullwhip Effect
Innovative companies in various industries have found that they can control the bullwhip effect and improve their supply chain performance by coordinating information and planning along the supply chain. Understanding the causes of the bullwhip effect can help managers find strategies to mitigate it.
· Avoid multiple demand forecast updates: Ordinarily, every member of a supply chain conducts some sort of forecasting in connection with its planning. Bullwhip effects are created when supply chain members process the demand input from their immediate downstream member in producing their own forecasts. Demand input from the immediate downstream member, of course, results from that member’s forecasting, with input from its own downstream member. Hence the best remedy to this is that to avoid repetitive processing of consumption data in a supply chain and instead to make available the demand data at a downstream site available to the upstream site. Hence, both sides can update their forecasts with the same raw data. In short share the POS data with the manufacturer. Hence, either by having mechanism (EDI) to share data or by bypassing the supply chain can counteract the ‘Bullwhip Effect’

· Back order batches: Since order batching contributes to the bullwhip effect, companies need to devise strategies that lead to smaller batches or more frequent resupply.

· Stabilize Prices: The best way to control bullwhip effect is to reduce both the frequency and the level of wholesale price discounting, establish a uniform wholesale pricing policy.

· Eliminate gaming is shortage situation: When a supplier faces a shortage, instead of allocating products based on orders, it can allocate in proportion to past sales record.