The story
The history of my family is closely linked to that of Prato and the textile industry, an adventure started by my grandfather, carried on by my father and my uncle, and now we have reached the 3rd generation through my cousin and me. The Angorelle knitwear factory was born as a company active in the contract manufacturing of men\women's knitwear, mainly for the foreign market. At the beginning of the 2000s, with the great geopolitical changes, such as the advent of the euro and China's entry into the WTO, profoundly changed our company's reference market. We have therefore started a profound transformation of our company by focusing on a higher quality product and putting the enhancement of Made in Italy at the center. This initiative did not stop only at the production level, but also under the commercial profile, in 2006 we created a new brand, Dalle Piane Cashmere with the aim of enhancing and passing on to the customer all the efforts made to improve and offer a quality product to the right price. Three years ago we launched a new line of garments called Dalle Piane Recycled made according to a sustainable production process. The yarn is made from a post-consumer process by recovering old cashmere garments and production waste, which are shredded and transformed, with the addition of virgin fiber, into yarn that is subsequently used to make new cashmere garments. The dallepianecashmere site currently covers 4 main markets: Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. We also market our products through marketplaces, we are present on Zalando in Europe while with Amazon both in Europe and North America. The brand is currently registered in Italy, the European Union, China and the United States of America. This profound turnaround to which we have subjected our company does not only concern the launch of an e-commerce site or landing on a marketplace, but has touched every part of the company: from the purchase of raw materials, to the production and logistics process, why, we have moved from the concept of batch production to one pice type. So we don't produce on orders from B2B customers or in the hope of selling, but trying to adapt production to market trends. At the beginning of 2017, a project was prepared for the improvement of the entire production system, extended to the entire value chain. The name of this initiative is APP, the acronym of Angorelle Production Process, which involved the entire supply chain, starting from relations with suppliers, choice of raw materials, up to the review of the return method for the items that customers decide to return. Starting from upstream of the supply chain, we reviewed the choice of raw material (yarn) suppliers, focusing on a well-defined list of colors and three product types. This simplification has led to the halving of suppliers, allowing a simplification both in the generation of orders during processing, and an optimized management of stocks and the relative allocation within the building using a Kanban model (in Japanese note). Thanks to this, orders are placed in a more expeditious and error-free manner, also avoiding running out of stock. Indeed, a new order is sent as soon as the level of existence falls below a certain value. The space occupied by inventories inside the warehouse also benefited from this management method, reducing the total volume and eliminating errors during the picking phase and sending to production.
Production process
The current production system is a classic "job shop" characterized by knitting machines (looms) of various gauges and types of processes, which can be configured with special set-ups to work in different ways, the manpower is highly skilled and versatile. Inside our In addition to the looms, there is a packaging machine. During 2017, without distorting or reconfiguring the current production layout, we introduced some typical practices of Lean Manufacturing, such as: production according to the "pull" model, just in time, production kanban, single piece or mini-batch processing. The method of putting into production has changed by extending the pull system (sales drive production), also to the production under the "Dalle Piane Cashmere" brand, which was previously done in push mode (first it is produced with the hope of selling). Given the increase in online sales, it was decided to completely change the layout of the workstations used for preparing orders to be processed, adding shelving to contain the finished products, divided by model and colour, inserting labels to facilitate comprehensive identification of the translation in three languages in addition to Italian, but above all by changing the operating philosophy. In fact, before the work was divided into batches, grouped orders were then prepared and sent, from 2017 instead we moved to single order management, following the FI.FO method. (First in – First out), thus giving priority to older orders and then moving on to subsequent deadlines. This new operating method, combined with the renewed layout, has contributed to doubling productivity, allowing twice as many orders to be prepared in the same amount of time.
The adoption of SAP B1