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With the premise of efficiency, productivity and sustainability gains, Lectra presented its latest Industry 4.0 solution on 28 May at CITEVE´s facilities in Vila Nova de Famalicão. Flex Offer is an automated, cloud-based fulfilment solution that meets the unique markdown processing needs of apparel suppliers in terms of costs, procurement and production.
Roberto de Almeida, Business Development Director, began by focussing his presentation on the industry’s current challenges and how this new product can help textile companies. ‘In an inflationary environment, where delivery times for raw materials are increasing, products are becoming more complex and collections are accelerating, but orders are lower than before. Companies are faced with a major challenge: they have to increase the number of orders in order to maintain their production volumes. At the same time, they have to ensure the best utilisation of fabric to maintain their margins. This puts a lot of pressure on the creation of plans, which is one of the crucial points in the final utilisation of the fabric,’ he contextualised to the audience.
The Flex Offer solution is basically an improvement on the solutions already offered by Diamino and Accunest. ‘The big change is that the calculations are done in the cloud. It still works like Tetris, but it does a better job of combining the plans,’ he compares, emphasising that “the result obtained does not suffer from the economic context as with current solutions.”
He also emphasised the advantage of Flex Offer being more responsive to production peaks, as it allows plans to be made in less time. ‘Microsoft Azure allows maximum speed, it’s not done in a queue, but in parallel,’ he explains. The solution has three levels available, depending on the type of orders: urgent (for urgent orders), standard (for normal volumes), strategic (for expensive raw materials).
In short, Flex Offer will make it possible to manage variable volumes of work, minimise risks and maximise margins, while controlling fabric costs for high-volume collaborations.