Nien Hsing Textile - build a better digital product development lifecycle with Frontier
Digitalization Strengthens the Competitive Advantages
Nien Hsing Textile Co., Ltd, founded in 1986, is one of world's largest denim textile
garment company with vertically integrated operation sites in Taiwan, Lesotho,
Mexico and Vietnam. With the advanced product innovation as the driving force
for the business growth, Nien Hsing has become one of major suppliers of global
apparel brands, with business footprints in Europe, America, and Asia markets.
Nien Hsing has foreseen that it is a
must to upgrade the production process when facing the rapid global market
changes. Improving its operation efficiency can be one of the ways to
strengthen the company’s competitive advantages. Therefore, Nien Hsing launched ERP
system in 2004, as the first step into the digitalization of its global
operational processes.
Meanwhile, as a supplier of
high-street brands like Levi’s, Gap, and so on, which have fast adopted the
technology to digitalize garment design processes, Nien Hsing must rapidly
upgrade its digital-enabled systems.
Challenges: A Fast Way to 3D Fabric Digitization and Accurate Display
The first challenge Nien Hsing
confronts is that a major apparel brand uses 3D design software CLO 3D in order
to speed up the time to market. They require their suppliers to provide 3D ready fabric for digital proofing. To meet this requirement, Nien Hsing must find a
compatible solution to digitize fabric samples.
During the raging period of the
COVID-19 pandemic, it was impossible for Nien Hsing to efficiently communicate
product details with its customers, let alone to display the look and feel of
physical textile samples through video conferences. It is necessary to find
more efficient ways to virtually showcase the quality of products and avoid losing
orders.
Frontier Makes Fabric Digitization Easy
Although textile companies are aware
of the importance of digitalization and use ERP/PLM solutions in production, many
operational processes are still performed offline, especially in cross-company
communication. Frontier has insights into the bottlenecks in the textile industry.If
companies expect to have more efficient workflows, the decision-making operations
should be completed on a thorough designed platform.
Moreover, Frontier also finds that textile manufacturers need the seamless digital connections
with their customers, especially when most of brands are leveraging
technologies to shorten the time to market. The lack of high-quality and
accurate digital fabrics limits brands’ abilities to fast track product
development with digital tools. To fulfill the demands of textile
manufacturers, Frontier provides methods allowing them to privately share fabric
data with their customers, which enables enterprises to directly communicate
with customers and gain more business opportunities as the market expands.
Frontier’s SaaS solution, adopted by Nien Hsing, allows fabric mills to provide their customers
accurate demonstration of fabric textures. With the use
of proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Frontier built up a
unique user generated online fabric platform.
By implementing the Frontier
solutions, Nien Hsing can scan all fabric swatches labeled and specification
with smart-upload function by using the scanning function of a standard
multi-function printer. The process of digitizing (2D) fabric swatches to 3D
materials is much simplified and straight to the customer’s requirement. That
not only facilitates Nien Hsing to solve the issue of sampling 3D fabrics in an
efficient way, but also provides the digital material compatibility with the
brand’s 3D software.
Digitalized Workflows Optimize the Business Competitiveness
Frontier’s technologies make
it easy and cost-effective for Nien Hsing to digitize textile samples without
any burden. What’s more, it greatly improves the business development and
reduces the operational costs by reshaping the go-to-market process, even during
the period of pandemic.
In the past, when several
salespersons went to visit different customers around the world, Nien Hsing had
to duplicate up to five sets of samples. Nowadays, with the help of
digitization, the required physical samples can be reduced to one or two sets,
avoiding a substantial amount of material waste and logistics costs.
In addition, with the accuracy
of the digitized fabric and complete fabric information, Nien Hsing can
precisely demonstrate the product characteristics and have efficient conference
meetings with customers. Even during the severe pandemic period, the
digitalized workflows still positively brought Nien Hsing new business
opportunities.
“Frontier helps us reduce the
sample production costs, and at the same time, it allows our products to be
more visible for our customers,” Nien Hsing Textile Division Sales Director
Jeff Tseng said.
Now, on the Nien Hsing’s
digital fabric gallery, provided by Frontier’s one-stop collaboration platform,
the customers can check all denim fabric collections with the precise fabric texture and
specifications, which greatly improves inefficient communications and
optimizing the possibilities to reach potential customers.
Frontier’s solution
successfully enables Nien Hsing to build a better digital product development
lifecycle, and to create more new business opportunities.