One of Sri Lanka’s largest weft knit fabric manufacturers, Textured Jersey Lanka, announced a joint venture between Pacific Textiles in Hong Kong and Brandix Lanka. Its manufacturing facility is set over 600,000 sq ft and has the capacity to knit, dye and finish approximately 2.5 million meters of weft knit fabric per month. Located in the Seethawaka Industrial zone, the company is looking to be the number one preferred supplier of weft knit fabric with a turnover of US $100 million a year by 2010. For the upcoming years, Textured Jersey Lanka will continue to invest in both growth and in high quality technologies, including SAP ERP and a fully automated colour kitchen for the dye house, using Arel Recipe Management System and Colour Service software.

The latest addition to this investment strategy is ‘FastReact’ planning, a specialist planning and management tool specifically designed for the Apparel and Textiles sector. The company has great faith in the potential benefits from a planning tool that is integrated with their SAP system, to provide total visibility across the entire organisation. Available features include the proactive management of customer projections and order receipts vs. available capacity, vertical knit and dye planning, including full raw materials visibility, and actual production status of all orders at a glance.

Mr. Rohan Goonetilleke, Managing Director commented: “One area that had previously been a headache for us was the coordination between marketing, planning and production – numerous meetings were needed to accurately quote delivery dates for customer inquiries. With FastReact we’ve already been able to bring all these functions together in one centralised system and respond to customers with an accurate delivery date in half the time it used to take us previously. Reaction from our staff in all areas has been great. Their ‘buy in’ to the process and willingness to embrace the solution has been fantastic.”

The system is fully networked throughout the business and a large on-line LCD screen in the Dye-house helps staff to clearly identify their work priorities based on the latest plan. In the near future, Textured Jersey Lanka aims to open up FastReact’s visibility to its supply chain as many of their customers already use the strategy planning.

Image: FastReact