TAL Apparel Limited, which was found in 1947 by
Lee family, is one of the largest garment manufacturers in the world. It sets up
its head quarter in Hong Kong and owns 11
factories all around the world. It mainly produces
innovative garments and well manages the whole supply chain system by
developing new technologies in order to add
value into their supply chains. Therefore, Innofacturer® is
the trademark of TAL.
The
visit was divided into three parts: Introduction & production demonstration, presentation and Q&A session.
Introduction & production demonstration
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| The speaker was showing the pants which could still keep straight without ironing after washing. |
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| The jointed polo shirt showed the products performance differences between TAL (right hand side) and others (left hand side) after 20 washes. |
At
the very beginning, the speaker utilized PowerPoints to show the history,
mission and products of the company. After that, some innovation products were
demonstrated to show the powerful technologies that they developed, for example
SofTAL Process® helped
garments
ensuring a wrinkle free pristine appearance throughout the day.
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| 4 different supply chain models were used by TAL. They were worked together to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the whole supply chain. |
IT technologies were utilized by TAL.
Presentation
After the demonstration,
the operation processes & policies,
technologies used of TAL were presented in detail. Their supply
chain models were separated into four levels, Quick Response (QR), Continuous Replenishment
(CR), Warehouse VMI and store VMI, in order to effectively forecast and manage own
inventory or customers’ inventory step by step. In addition, some technologies,
such as pick-to-light system and cross docking were applied daily to enhance
the efficiency of the product flow within the supply chain. Make-to-Measure was
one of the value-added services to provide more choice and personalized
services for end customers.
Q&A session
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| Mr. Roger Lee (right hand side) was answering the questions. |
Finally, it was honored that Mr. Roger Lee, the CEO of TAL Group, answered
our questions personally during the Q&A session. We raised altogether
six questions as follows:
1. VMI & MTM system help to offer great services to customers. How does TAL turn these innovations to a sustainable competitive advantage in a long run in order to avoid competitors’ replication?
First of all, it was required to understand the limitation of the existing products so TAL could continuously investigate, develop some new technologies. At the same time, it was necessary to understand the real needs of customers since the requirements of customers and markets always kept changing. Despite the investigation of new products, TAL would always upgrade the product requirements based on the needs. In order to maintain the competitiveness, supply chain reengineering and employee training were also important to support these activities. Combined all these elements, external competitors were difficult to directly replicate their core business. Moreover, TAL was always the first mover. They maintained a good relationship with their customers by efficiently communication. Therefore, they could obtain sustainable competitive advantage.
2. As an international company, how does TAL resolve the problem related to cultural differences or uncertainties?
TAL hired the right people
from different countries. In order to deal with the culture issue, they mainly
arranged the local people to manage the business for their hometown since they were
the one who clearly understood the local culture.
3. Would TAL expand the market share to Asia Market in the future?
TAL was planning to expand the market to Sheung Hai. However, it was very difficult to enter the market because of the different lifestyle. Firstly, the demand of suits in China was much less than US. Therefore, the price strategy and production volume should be carefully considered again. Secondly, the taste of the Chinese was very hard to be measured. Since the franchise business model was quite popular in China nowadays, the bargaining power of franchisee was large enough to control the taste of the market but no longer the brand itself. It caused the failure in measuring the taste of Chinese people. As a result, TAL was going to spend at least five years to figure out these problems before the expansion.
4. TAL relies heavily
on the advanced information systems and the IS involve in most of the TAL’s operations to help TAL gains
competitive advantages. However, there are so many hackers who specially attack the business server to
steal information or destroy the system operation. Does TAL have any contingency plan if the information
systems go down and how can TAL convince their customers to share their own information
in this situation?
TAL had a strong IT teams to
support their daily operations. They utilized Electric Data Interchange (EDI) or
other secure measurements to defend the privacy of their customers. Furthermore,
all kinds of documents would be encrypted during transferring. The most
important was that TAL looked forward the long term partnership with their
customers so there was a commitment to guarantee no any information revealed. For
the case of systems going down, TAL constructed a list procedure for this situation. They kept the
weekly data backup so the company could still use past data and excel
spreadsheet to maintain the general operation. On the other hand, TAL thought
the value of its data collected was not high enough to attract the hackers so
it was a serious problem for them.
5. What is the future
strategy to deal with the global level network?
A consistent and straight forward strategy would be used.
TAL continuously focused on its own mission which was the innovative
manufacturing with offering extra supply chain services for their customers. Since
manufacturing a shirt was not an easy job, it required lots of disciplines. Therefore,
lots of interaction was a necessary. People chose TAL because TAL clearly understood
the industry and the capability itself, it always provided professional
solutions and met customers’ expectation so high reliability could be created.
TAL through reliability was an essential element for a garment manufacturer. As
a result, TAL was willing to put effort on training the right people to enhance
the quality of whole team.
6. TAL is going to
have the RFID tags on its products as multiple RFID tags can be read at the
same time. This may help to save the time and cost in the inventory management. If RFID tags are used
in the products, how will TAL solve the possible privacy matter
that might be encountered?
It was hard to apply RFID technology for a product during garment manufacturing
process. It was because the using RFID is mainly for checking purpose only, for
example TAL wanted to check whether the products completed the washing process
or not. Although the cost of non-reusable RFID was not high, it was meaningless
for using RFID since they could check the products by other methods such as
measuring the weight. It was possible for using reusable RFID but the cost was
really high and the working processes needed to be revised. Additionally, the
privacy problem was another issue when applying RFID technology. Some customers
did not like being tracked.
Reflection on the visit
After the visit, we all agreed
that TAL was full of
passion in training next generations. It was because Mr. Lee, the CEO of TAL, found time to answer our questions personally. It was really
impressive for a CEO to spend time on meeting a group of students. We felt so honor
to learn from him. Additionally, our team both awoke that the innovations related to not only the creativity,
but also the change. TAL taught us that manufacturer could also perform at a
non-traditional way to add value into the supply chain and make information
flow becoming faster and accurate. TAL has done well on both products
development and supply chain management. We looked forward to its future
development.
