The Fact
Brands gets recognition for its quality products. Manufactures get continuous production orders for their quality work and making uality garments.So, serious business owners always give importance in product quality control and process control.Making and delivering good quality products should be the main goal for any fashion brands and fashion manufacturing companies. If you aware about the fashion supply chain, you may know that many clothing brands used to outsource stitching production and they handle the finishing in packaging at the end. There are many apparel manufacturers who take orders from the apparel buyers. Due to their capacity limitation, they used to outsource the garment stitching. This is a common practice in fashion sourcing.
Managing quality of the garment, trims, and raw materials is manageable when all processes are done inhouse. When garment quality is checked, inspected, and controlled by your own team as they will be committed to do their job. You can’t expect same level of stitching quality (and finishing quality) when you outsource the production from subcontractors.
Challenges in managing quality of outsourced orders
You will be shipping all the orders to your buyer from your end. So, you cannot neglect finished garment quality for the outsource garments. If something not made as per specs by your subcontractors, you will be responsible for that quality issue.
To the buyers, it doesn’t matter who is making their garments. They need quality product, and the finished garment quality must meet their requirement. In my interaction of with big apparel manufacturers and with some buying house employees, I came to know that most of them are facing challenges in controlling quality of the outsourced orders. It is not only the delay of manufacturing, but they do also not get the production status of their orders when they need it. Today many buyers need quality control status of the order that are on the production stage.
Many small job-workers do not employ any quality checkers and quality controller for managing quality. How can you expect quality inspection report from them? That is why you can’t expect same level of product quality that you can make inhouse production facilities.
So, now the question is how one can manage the outsource orders when they need to work subcontractors? You can’t apply your quality control policy in your vendors factories. You can’t increase the cost of quality of the vendor factories.
Work around for controlling quality of subcontracting orders
You can improve product quality by reducing defect generation and eliminating the sources of defect generation at the production stage.
How will you do that?
- A detailed quality checking reports of garment production processes, quality audit report
can assist on improving process quality. - You need day to day production status, tracking of quality issues in the previous orders.
- You need order wise quality performance report of the orders daily basis
- You need list of frequently occurring defects and further you may need the source of
defects. - You need daily quality data analysis and projection of quality issues for a specific order.
To get all these reports and information you need to use technology solutions that will help you
capturing apparel quality data on real-time and improve the process visibility of all order including
inhouse production and outsourced orders.
Solution – Bringing quality data in single platform
So in today’s competitive market, you can control product quality of the outsource orders by improving visibility, and data transparency. To achieve this goal, you need to take help of the latest quality control applications.
Provide SQC applications to the quality checkers. Such quality applications can be installed in tablet and mobile phones. Checkers will collect quality inspection data when they visit the subcontractors’ production facilities. If the subcontractors have quality checkers, you can suggest them to use mobile application for capturing quality inspection data.
Capture garment quality checking data through SQC applications. Make the quality reports available to your internal team in real-time who can take decision on further action. Many SQC applications are capable of providing detailed statistic of quality DHU, style wise quality performance, identifying frequently occurring defects and can identify the source of any defects. Get repair work information
and track time for the repair work. That is how you know your suppliers’ performance in terms quality management. This tool can assist
you controlling your subcontractors and evaluate them for placing future orders.
If there is no system of quality checking and quality report making, mobile applications are right tool for starting quality checking and at the same recording all the flaws found in stitched garments, in operations when checker do inline inspection.
Stitch quality control module is a right tool for managing inhouse garment quality as well as
garment quality of outsource orders. An easy to install mobile based quality control application.
Book a demo to know more about Stitch Quality Control Application.