The American chain not only saves the time that it would have spent ifit had tried to put together a supply chain on its own, but also isnow able to concentrate on what it does best, which is marketing andselling the garments it has sourced from Li & Fung.

Rat Race

It was the pressure to reduce time-to-market as well as enhance thevalue of the final products that had nudged Li & Fung to implement asolution that would improve the transparency of the supply chain toall participants. Currently being implemented with Li & Fung's leadingsuppliers, the solution is expected to enable the participants todrastically improve their capabilities to, say, respond to suddenchanges in customer requirements or a disruption at any point in thesupply chain. Li & Fung chose to partner MicrosoftMicrosoft to help it developand implement this solution. The first phase of the implementationstarted last May. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

There was much paperworkbefore Li & Fung implemented this solution with its top-tiersuppliers. "We receive purchase orders (POs) from our customers viavarious methods: EDI, e-mail, fax and so on," says Albert Ip, Li &Fung's IT director. On most occasions, order information was manuallytyped into Li & Fung's central database and transmitted on to varioussuppliers concerned. Many of these suppliers would then have to againtype in the relevant bits of the orders from Li & Fung, and that wouldbe forwarded to their own suppliers. Apart from being time consuming,that system of paperwork has been prone to inefficiencies that stemfrom mistakes made whenever data is wrongly re-entered into thesystem.

Furthermore, the use of EDI is time consuming and expensive. "This isbecause a lot of the programmable codes for the order cannot bere-used for other customers," says Ip. There are hassles with e-mail,fax and flat files as well. "With e-mail, fax and flat files, we havehad to either manually upload or re-type the data into oursystems."