Stretchline’s digital transformation with MillenniumIT ESP
Stretchline (Pvt) Ltd is the world’s largest narrow fabric manufacturer and the first global brand of elastic. Established in 1996, the company is a three-way joint venture between Stretchline (UK), MAS Holdings (Sri Lanka) and Brandot International Ltd (USA). Stretchline has manufacturing plants in Sri Lanka, China, Indonesia, Mexico, Honduras, the US, and the UK, which are supported by marketing offices in the US, the UK, and Hong Kong, enabling the group to provide needlepoint support to the world’s leading lingerie and activewear brands.
A future of digitalization
Helped realize Stretchline’s digitalization plan for 2025 – to transition from manual sales order processing to a fully automated system that ensures high accuracy and high production volumes.
Employee productivity
Enabled significant data entry time savings of 793 hours/month by deploying the RPA solution at one plant, freeing up employees’ time to engage in productive and value-adding activities.
Process accuracy
Implemented RPA BOTs to optimize the sales order processing system, which reduced delays, ensured high data accuracy, and increased employee productivity.
Streamline business processes
Working with Stretchline to expand the project scope and implement the system in other parts of Sri Lanka, as well as in Indonesia and China
The Challenge
A key initiative of Stretchline’s Digitization Plan for 2025, was to transition its employees away from non-cognitive work and use automated/software services where it could optimize the overall production process. Stretchline’s requirement was to address delays and errors in the sales order processing system while ensuring high accuracy in data entry and updating systems with high volume traffic. Therefore, the PO process was selected as a starting point as it is the first step of value creation and is critical to ensuring a seamless operation of the entire journey.
Solution Offered
The teams from MIT ESP engaged in several discussions with the sales teams at Stretchline to understand the processes and core pain points to come up with the end-to-end scope of the solution architecture. They implemented RPA BOTs which can accept sales orders from customers and enter them directly into the ERP system. By digitizing the manual process, Stretchline significantly reduced the number of man-hours required for the PO process. The BOT solution also allowed POs to be entered into the system on the same day, minimized human errors while entering the details, and managed a high volume of POs with ease.
Business Impact
Stretchline was able to incur a significant time saving of 793 hours/month of data entry by deploying the RPA solution at only one plant. They now plan to implement this system in other parts of Sri Lanka and expand to operations in Indonesia and China. By streamlining and standardizing the process across the board, the BOTs also maintained a higher accuracy and freed up the employees’ time to engage in more productive and value-adding activities.
The scalability of the overall process and the ability to handle larger volumes were a few additional business outcomes gained by implementing the RPA solution. MIT’s engineering and sales teams’ many years of experience working in the apparel domain allowed them to quickly relate to and address the issues faced by the Stretchline team and they are keen on expanding the project scope with more project optimization and re-engineering in the future.