Matrix BOM for Stock Control and Production Scheduling in Garments Industry

Textile, Apparel, Clothing & Garments Industry Overview

The global apparel industry has seen remarkable changes in the past decades. The garment manufacturing industry and garment producers are now always looking for cheaper source of production. The days when the industry was concentrated in the consumption hubs of US, EU and other developed countries of the world are gone.

The clothing supply is increasing worldwide and elimination of import quotas has led to a shift towards lower-cost Asian, African and Latin American countries. However, in future, the factors that will affect the rise or fall of the clothing industry of sourcing countries include political and economic stability, labour standards and production organization. The bigger buyer wishes the garments producer to serve, the higher requirements to production management should be matched.

Specifics of Stock Control and Production Planning for Garments Industry

The garment industry has one serious specialty – it is a combination of highly massive production and a need to produce a wide range of the same goods in different sizes and colors.

An MRP system should understand that a variety of such parameters doesn’t require entering an endless amount of information into the database for each particular combination of varying parameters. What is the solution to that?

The solution is called the Matrix BOM or Product Configurator as part of the Bill of Materials functionality. By using the parameters like size or color (or even color scheme), and their relations, Matrix BOM generates a family of products with different parameters for a stock database.

Bill of materials, and Routing, can be made for one product only – by using the abovementioned functionality, the software will clearly understand which particular material should be used in a particular production operation.

We do not want to stop very long to describe the particular BOM functionality – it is well described in MRPeasy documentation, or you can try the functionality for free here.

As a supplement, we wish to underline that Matrix BOM could be used in any industry where products from one family (product line) differ only by some parameters. It can be the electronics industry or any other.

Learn more about Production Planning and Production Scheduling.