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.