EmbTrak

Mom-and-pop businesses occupy a huge chunk of the decorated products industry. However, these small, family-owned, or independent businesses have limited knowledge and training in lean manufacturing and continuous process improvement strategies, which hinders their efficiency in producing high-quality, cost-effective, and sustainable products.

Addressing this issue is EmbTrak, Inc., a software company dedicated to creating solutions that help modernize businesses in the $25B decorated products industry. This sector consists partly of promotional product companies that focus on selling decorated offerings. On the fulfillment end of the business, there are contract decorators such as embroidery or screen print shops. The EmbTrak suite of solutions optimizes the art creation process at the start and the fulfillment process at the end of the market.

In the late 1990s, Donald Brown, president at EmbTrak, realized that the computer software available in the decorated products market was useful to speed up manual processes, meet business requirements and boost sales. However, he concluded that it failed to leverage the full possibilities of computer software. In short, it sped up operations like entering orders and printing reports but did not support improvement in the various fulfillment processes. Bridging this gap, he developed EmbTrak using his experience as a cost control manager in major manufacturing.

Today, it is helping some of the largest firms in the apparel industry to expand their sales and overall competitiveness by meeting demands for same-day shipment, flawless quality, and minimal costs. EmbTrak optimizes the embroidery operations, seamlessly aligning with existing sales force automation (SFA), e-commerce, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and warehouse management systems (WMS). For example, it displays a 3D image of every machine stitch file (DST or UO1) in the user-selected colors inside the order screen itself. EmbTrak also delivers full color customer proofs emailed from within the system as PDFs. These are generated from computer order data in seconds.

Conventional embroidery and screen print schedules use either a manual assignment of orders or computer schedulers based on total time allowance per piece or other quick estimations. In its Visual Scheduler, EmbTrak uses industrial-engineer-type calculations based on the many granular factors involved. For example, it uses labor time to thread each needle, machine time to trim a thread, thread changes from one order to the next, thread changes for each run within the order, and dozens of other factors. This detailed approach results in embroidery machine schedules that improve the overall efficiency of the operation by optimizing order assignments to the best machines. Further, it optimizes the sequence of all orders on each machine for minimum thread changes from one order to the next. One major operation with over 700 embroidery heads compared EmbTrak Visual Scheduler with its own internally developed scheduler. Its process engineers concluded after a month that just by scheduling with EmbTrak, their overall output per shift would increase 18.3 percent over their scheduler with no increase in either labor cost or machine time.

Another major benefit of its approach is that Visual Scheduler calculates a Standard Rate for each work order with a calculated runtime. By scanning the work order start and end time, EmbTrak can compare and report the Standard Time for the order with the actual run time. This is the most accurate method in the decorated products industry for determining labor productivity by an employee. It is also the only method for validly comparing one individual’s work their peers. Why? Because each work order of embroidery and screen printing is unique and only IE rates can provide comparable standards.

EmbTrak also includes a highly configurable methodology for automatically building a unique work order routing for each distinct order. This routing, for example, reflects whether new art is required or not, includes Value Added Services specified by the order, and properly sequences each operation. This enables each step taken for every order to be scanned in sequence to ensure not only where an order is, but also that it does not miss a critical step.
Integration with other systems can be as loose or as tight as needed. At one current implementation of EmbTrak, the automatically calculated schedule will be passed to the WMS to guide the timing for product picks for each order. The WMS will then deliver the picked materials to the machine to which the order is scheduled and run in its sequence with other scheduled orders. At another major site, when retail onesie twosie e-commerce orders arrive in EmbTrak from the SAP ERP system, they are automatically colored by EmbTrak and sent to production. There, the numerous similar small orders are combined by EmbTrak into “Super-Orders” of a preset count range. These “Super-Orders” are scheduled to large, multi-head machines for a quicker turn. These are shipped within hours of arrival in SAP.

EmbTrak’s KPI Dashboard directly supports continuous improvement, while its quantitative approach provides analytics reports for decision-making.

“Our solutions allow our clients to create their products with lower costs, higher levels of quality, and faster turn time. Emphasis upon continuous process improvement can only strengthen the decorated products industry, from golf apparel to corporate identity to glassware to T-Shirts”, says Brown.

A few months after one of its golf pro shop clients implemented the EmbTrak software, their field sales force reported a marked improvement in product quality and customer service. A Canadian company installed EmbTrak in their business operations system, which reduced the average time to ship a corporate embroidery order from 18 days down to 6.2 days. Similarly, one of EmbTrak’s U.S.-based clients reported that their turn time on rush embroidery orders dropped from three days to six hours thanks to EmbTrak.

A story further substantiating EmbTrak’s benefits is its collaboration with Chef Works, a supplier of uniforms and accessories looking to automate their workflow, improve their custom embroidery operations, and enable customers to select and confirm embroidery options online. For this, EmbTrak developed integrations to Chef Works’ existing implementation of Sage ERP. This enabled the seamless movement of process orders from the ERP solution to EmbTrak, driving fewer data entry errors and marked time savings. For this project, EmbTrak also integrated with the Chef Works’ web order entry portal to streamline their internal order approval system, allowing customers access to pricing, listing, and customization of garment orders.

EmbTrak is currently working to equip small and mid sized embroiders and screen printers to help them improve their competitiveness. In Q1 2023, it will complete the beta site testing of a system called EmbTrak Connect, which will allow garment sellers to select orders and directly send them to EmbTrak contractors over the internet. EmbTrak Connect will enable order originators and contractors to each save about 28 dollars per order in clerical labor. It will also shrink contractor turnaround time from five days to two days.

EmbTrak plans to set new decoration industry standards for fulfillment quality, process improvement, fast turn time, and low costs for decorated product vendors with its ever-evolving portfolio of tailored solutions.