How Fashion-Specific Technology Can Drive Future Growth

Fashion-specific technology can drive future growth by adopting these strategies, such as improving supply chain visibility with cloud ERP, increasing shop floor control productivity, elevating customer experiences, and improving sustainability.

FREMONT, CA: Fashion and apparel industry trends change rapidly, requiring nearly flawless supply chains and manufacturing execution. Businesses must deploy business and technology strategies that drive growth through customer acquisition, new product development, resilience, and productivity improvements in order to outcompete their competitors.  

In order to gain insight into technology and transformation, enterprise software solutions provider Aptean surveyed North American manufacturing companies producing fashion and clothing, footwear, textiles, and fabrics to gauge key priorities, top challenges, and best strategies.

Fashion and apparel brands and manufacturers can leverage fashion-specific technology to help drive future growth in the following ways:

With cloud ERP, companies can improve supply chain visibility: Scalability cannot be achieved by generic legacy systems with outdated technologies. Aside from being expensive and time-consuming, upgrades and configurations are also time-consuming.

Cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions enable company owners to scale as their business grows. The flexibility of cloud ERP allows companies to respond rapidly to changing market conditions, supply chain pressures, and customer demands. EDI enables seamless connectivity to customers, vendors, and third-party logistics (3PL) with an industry-specific cloud ERP, automates reporting and business analytics and supports inventory management with a warehouse management system.

Enhance sustainability: Among those surveyed, 36 percent ranked meeting sustainable mandates around climate change as the biggest external pressure. By reducing, reusing, recycling, and recovering fashion and apparel products and materials, sustainability can be improved.

Through integrated, industry-specific solutions, brands can streamline internal processes, improve traceability, and comply with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) mandates.

Productivity on the shop floor can be increased: Companies cannot control the labor market's complexities, but they can increase productivity through automation. In relation to the survey, more than half of respondents are currently using or plan to use new technology to automate tasks.

Enhance the customer experience: Without the right tools and processes, enhancing the customer experience can be challenging. According to a National Retail Federation report, U.S. buyers returned $816 billion worth of merchandise to retailers last year.

An inflationary environment requires brands to provide exceptional service to existing customers as well as attract new customers. With a solution like Aptean Apparel ERP, companies can embrace omnichannel fulfillment strategies by streamlining inventory management to prevent stockouts of needed sizes or colors, utilizing EDI for faster digital communication, providing seamless, hassle-free return processes, and gaining real-time visibility into orders, production, and delivery so organizations can provide exact order status updates to customers.