Why do we need to be right-at-first-time now more than ever?

Bangladesh started its journey as a Ready made Garments Manufacturer back at 1977 with a joint venture of Daewoo of South-korea and Desh Garments Ltd. Since then , this industry is continuously helping to build the economical backbone of this country, by exporting around 82% of the total value of export. By doing so, we have officially become the second largest RMG exporter in the world, just after China. In last fiscal year of 2016-17, we have successfully exported 28.14 Billion dollar worth of goods. Quite a remarkable achievement.

But still this is not going okay for us. We have achieved the lowest growth in our apparel sector in 2016-17 within last 15 years. According to provisional data of Export Promotion Bureau (EPB), Bangladesh’s export earnings from the RMG sector stood at $28.14 billion, posting 0.20% growth in the past fiscal year. The figure is 7.34% less than the target of $30.38 Billion.

So what we are actually not doing right? We are being right, but not on the first time. And this is costing us money, and eventually having an impact on our export's growth rate. If you are serving in the RMG industry of Bangladesh, the one scenario is quite common to you is "Firefighting". We love to firefight, in some aspect we feel sheer pride that we can get things done in extreme situation. But every time you have to "firefight" to solve a situation, the only root cause was something went wrong or we did not predict it right at first time, and also nobody notified us or we could not figure it out when we had enough time to correct that. And also every time we are firefighting we are loosing our efficiency, hampering our quality of work, shuffling our priorities to solve imminent problem so also jeopardizing the upcoming works. We are anyhow saving today, but leaving a much more messier tomorrow.

But the industry trends are changing. Big players like Amazon.com and Asos.com are grabbing the market, and they have only started. Amazon.com has surpassed Wal-mart Stores.inc as their revenue jumped 20% to 23.2 Billion in last year. A lot of big retailers also did not see this coming, as they also have to re-innovate themselves to compete with these tech-giants. The possible industry change can be sum up with two different words, "Speed" and "Variety". In order to survive this volatile change, as ready made garments manufacturing industry, we must satisfy these two obvious factor.

This is where the real challenge comes and partially explains why we have failed to sustain our export growth rate. As the industry is demanding "Speed" & "Variety", which is cutting the lead time short in almost half. In simple explanation, now we have do manage a lot more activities within almost half of the time. This is where being Right-at-first-time is becoming much more crucial. We simply do not have the luxury to firefight everyday now.

So we have identified the core challenges, for which we are suffering. But what is the way out? What magic wand do we need to use to deliver this growing industry urgency? We need to think step by step. Apart from everything, i still believe that we are in lack of expertise human resource in our industry. Most of the industry is still running on 1977's philosophy and methodology. More technical expertise such as textile engineers, industrial engineers are joining the industry , but it is not enough considering our volume. Second to human resource, data management in this industry is a disaster. Still most of the companies are using Microsoft Excel to maintain their millions of transaction and do strategic and operational planning. As the paradigm shift already happened in the industry, we need to have good framework of data management and analysis. The reason is to deliver different variety with speed, we need to make constant analysis and decision, for which we need lots of data sorted in information, useful analytic information. To process all of these information from thousands of disconnected Mircosoft excel spreadsheet is a disaster and nightmare for the employee of the companies, and almost 90% of the time they cant generate the report that we need to evaluate the situation and take management decision. As a result, most of the time we are taking decision and doing strategic & operational planning based on historical experiences or assuming the average situation. But if we consider average, its like a stopped watch giving right time only two times a day. So, decisions taken based on experience or average assumption are often not accurate or realistic to the particular scenario. So the plan does not stick, and we have to change the initial best plan , and for that we have to firefight a lot. Firefighting again means we are not being right-at-first-time. So the circle goes on and on.

We need technology, but as a technology solution provider, i know more than anyone that we need human expertise in a much more greater scale. The world is changing, and it will change much more in next 5 years as it had in last 25 years, so we must be prepared. We must be prepare to analysis the business trends before it happens, so that we can be one step ahead of the changes. So that we can set better strategies to adapt the continuous changes. The technology adaption of this industry will come eventually, and the journey has already began. In Bangladesh alone, we have more clients as a tech-solution provider than any other country in the world. We just need the mindset changes of ours to embrace these changes and to build a stronger foundation for tomorrow's challenges. And we will shine, much more than we have ever shone.

Authors introduction:

Ayan Barua is currently working with Coats Digital as Business Development Manager for Bangladesh . He has worked in Four H Group, Fakir Fashion and Epyllion Group in IE and Supply Chain Department. He is an Industrial Engineer Graduate From Shahjalal University Of Science and Technology.

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