Many retailers in the textile industry are seeking ways to gain an advantage over global competition by offering the best value to customers. Globalization, coupled with increasing customer demands, has resulted in an industry that has had to rapidly leverage technology to find a competitive edge, from developing ways to make products more durable and processes more efficient, to reducing waste and becoming more environmentally friendly.
The Importance of Using Document Management Software
Depending on the size of the organization, a textile company can generate hundreds if not thousands of documents daily, including invoices, purchase orders, labels, design patterns, employee contracts, and more. Textile companies are faced with the task of managing supply chains characterized by the flow of goods, services, money, and information both within and among business entities including suppliers, manufacturers, and customers, and so they must interface with a wide range of organizations engaged in transportation, warehousing, information processing, materials handling, and production scheduling.
Manually assigning resources to handle these arduous tasks can result in thousands of man hours and significant increases in an organization’s operational costs. With this in mind, automating these processes with Document Management Software (DMS) becomes a necessity.
By using DMS to automate tasks within the textile industry, companies can significantly increase the speed and efficiency of various internal processes resulting in more time to concentrate on business strategies and increased profitability. And improving processes and document quality can have a significant impact on a company’s brand and customer relationships.
Employing the technology of DMS allows for intuitive solutions for organizing and generating various documents in a minimal amount of time. With eFileCabinet, documents can also be sent securely to suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors with which the textile company is engaged.
Another important element of the textile industry that can greatly benefit from implementing DMS is traceability. Textile traceability affords companies the ability to track the garment life cycle from fiber through manufacturing via the visualization of the supply chain.
Tracing the product life cycle allows textile companies to offer and secure:
- Guarantees of authenticity: Particularly relevant for luxury, high-end, and safety-critical products in order to prevent forgery.
- Quality control: Specifically of interest for expensive and safety-critical products, or products produced in very large batches.
- Reputation: Here traceability serves to ascertain the origins of raw materials (e.g. for reasons of environmental damage, child labor, animal abuse, etc.)
- Standard audits: Today, many products or brands carry or adhere to standards of various types. Be it organic cotton or ISO 9001, traceability is ultimately a built-in procedural and compulsory aspect of all of these.
- Savings/efficiencies: Gives managers the information needed to make cost-saving decisions at any given production stage. Traceability can help companies cut down on waste, reduce errors in production, and eliminate inefficiencies.
Ensuring that documents and processes are traceable and records are properly maintained are mandated by government regulations, including the Textile Fiber Products Identification, the Wool Act, and the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA).
How Can Textile Industries Benefit from eFileCabinet?
Look no further than eFileCabinet for your document management needs. The various tools and add-ons provided by eFileCabinet are designed to assist sectors like the textile and mills industry in automating and streamlining processes and procedures to maximize efficiency.
Dedicating resources to managing a plethora of paperwork decreases productivity and profits. eFileCabinet’s secure Cloud storage renders company files instantly accessible, and its intuitive interface allows users to quickly tag and organize files and folders. With eFileCabinet’s powerful scanning capabilities, invoices, purchase orders, financial accounts, and photos can all be added to the DMS by printing directly to eFileCabinet, dragging, dropping, and right-clicking, or using the powerful Zonal OCR function to scan directly to eFileCabinet.
eFileCabinet’s audit trail function also lets companies meet industry-specific traceability needs by tracking and monitoring documents in the system. The audit trail function allows companies to identify when files are uploaded, updated, accessed, and deleted, and by whom.
Lastly, textile-related processes may be fully automated using the eFileCabinet workflow module. Workflow ensures that documents are automatically routed to relevant parties for action. With a properly set up workflow, you can streamline document authorization and decision making.
These are just a few of the ways in which the textile industry can harness the power of eFileCabinet. To discover other ways in which you can benefit from eFileCabinet’s many powerful features, fill out the form provided in order to receive a free 15-minute demo.