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Arvind Ltd. Improves Efficiency With Microsoft Power Apps

• By Textile Excellence
• Saturday, 30th Sep 2023

The Indian textile and clothing industry is moving towards Industry 4.0. Technology is being used like never before. ITMA 2023 proved that textile technology is just as happening as technologies in other exciting areas.

And yet, we can find the textile manufacturing industry working in archaic ways even today. Few companies document the samples they have made over the years, with samples just piling up in the warehouses. So one can imagine how time-consuming it would be if a customer asks for a sample that the company made say a decade ago.

It is not just a labour-intensive job to hunt out one sample from the millions that may have been made, it is prone to misinformation, errors, resulting in missing deadlines, having a direct financial impact on the business. In this time when a buyer is not short of options, this can be a very costly error.

To make the sampling process more efficient, Arvind Ltd. opted for Microsoft’s Power Apps, a low-code app development platform from Microsoft.

Until a few years ago, the Indian textile sector had remained largely tech averse.  While businesses will invest in the right machinery, software takes a backseat.

The pandemic took meetings with customers and others online, but the bigger push for digital transformation came from international clients who were rolling out sustainability targets. Traceability became an absolute necessity, and manual systems are no longer relevant. ERP adoption is therefore increasing in the industry today.

Arvind Ltd. started with migrating to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud service, and implementing Dynamics 365 CRM as the first steps, and helped marketing connect with customers. Next came the factory floor.

The sampling department of Arvind in particular plays a crucial role in bagging clients and keep them coming for more. It not only serves as a repository of all the fabric samples that the company has ever made, it also serves as a giant catalogue for future sales. But up until last year, the process was archaic.

Papers with details of orders would get lost, leading to wrong specifications and other errors. With no central sample library, the company would end up recreating samples they already had, wasting time and fabric. It was nearly impossible to track the status of any order in real-time, leading to a poor customer experience.

That was the challenge Parmar and his team placed before Bitscape, an Ahmedabad-based consulting firm and Microsoft partner, when they participated in an “App in a Day” workshop last year.

Think of these workshops as speed dating sessions where customers can get prototype of apps to solve specific problems using Microsoft Power Apps. During the workshop, the Bitscape team created a working proof of concept to digitize the entire sampling process.

“At Bitscape, we’ve always believed in the power of technology to transform,” said Kartik Shah, chief executive of Bitscape. “With Power Apps and its integrated AI capabilities, we’re not just simplifying processes – we’re enabling smarter decisions, faster results, and true digital empowerment for our clients.”

The solution, which runs on both PCs and smartphones, creates a QR code for every sampling order that the marketing team receives. The code is mapped to the existing CRM entry for the order, which has all the details of textile specifications, timelines, and others.

Unlike earlier, when sheets of papers were passed from the marketing to design to the production floor that led to information loss and delays, a simple scan of the QR code now tells them what needs to be done and move it forward to the next team. Every move is updated on the CRM, so the marketing team can track the status of the order and remove roadblocks.

Crucially, workers on the production floor can now refer to the exact specification for every order, reducing errors and fabric wastage.

The team also started a digital sample library, which has so far amassed details of more than 40,000 samples since Power Apps was deployed in October last year. The marketing team can now quickly see if there’s a match, before going through the entire design and production process for each client request.

Most importantly, it’s easy to use. According to one marketing manager at Arvind Ltd. a self-described non-tech savvy employee, who has been with Arvind for quarter of a century. “The gadget I use the most is a mobile phone,” he says in Hindi, “This is just like that.”

According to Arvind Ltd. since implementing Microsoft Power Apps in October 2022, human errors in sampling are down by 90%, production errors by 70%, and the turnaround time for orders is as much as 30% shorter. His team is now looking at more uses for Power Apps, such as creating a portal for vendors to submit bids for contracts, as well as streamlining the cotton purchasing process.

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