How a fashion group gets its suppliers to optimise every shipment

What was in place

A packing report describes how a factory packs a shipment. It is how the group checks that the boxes, and the trucks they fill, carry as much as possible without harming the garments. Factories filled them in Excel, about 200 a day. The transport team reviewed each one by hand, with no record of who changed what, and followed the results in a dashboard built from PDFs.

The objectives

1. One way of reporting for every factory: the same report and the same rules everywhere.
2. Reliable figures: what the group already knows comes from its own systems, never retyped.
3. A faster review, with a record of who changed what, and why.
4. A measured gain: the transport team sees how well shipments are packed, without waiting for a document.

What we did

We teamed up with a global consultancy as its Retool experts, while its own team brought its knowledge of the group. We designed the architecture and the data model, and built the application with its developers.

A reporting portal for the factories. Each report opens already filled with what the group knows about the shipment, drawn from its systems. The factory adds the rest, with photos as evidence, and submits.

A control desk for transport. Every report lands in one place. The team filters, corrects, comments and approves, and each change is kept with its reason.

A dashboard. The reports, combined with data from more than eight of the group’s systems, show how well shipments are packed.

The result

The 8,000 factories report on one platform, to one process: 40,000 packing reports a year, prefilled, reviewed in one place, every change on record.

Packing used to live in thousands of Excel files. Now it lives in one place, and the transport team sees which factories pack well and where the next truck can carry more.