Digitalization is key to the fashion industry meeting its sustainability and profitability goals

Digitalization improves sustainability and transparency initiatives in the fashion industry by closing the gap between businesses and their suppliers and customers. This contraction of the global supply chain enables fashion companies to choose the highest quality suppliers, coordinate their efforts to achieve “zero waste” throughout their value chain and take advantage of nearshoring opportunities to lower transportation-associated carbon emissions.

Fashion companies gaining direct insight into how the supply chain operates will make smarter decisions to benefit their business, the environment and society.

As Mathieu Bonenfant - Fashion Market Strategy Director at Lectra - says: "Improving collaboration and communication with suppliers is key to building trust, advancing sustainability initiatives, ensuring greater efficiency and faster delivery time to the consumer".

Digitalization improves resource efficiency and the sustainability

The environmental impacts of the fashion industry—energy and water consumption, pollution, material waste and the supply chain footprint—are achievable by improving production efficiency while controlling product consistency and quality.

Fashion companies taking advantage of digital connectivity and communication between the equipment, people and software in their supply chain gain deeper and faster collaboration. Digitalization enables businesses to leverage data to increase material efficiency, which in turn decreases energy demand and water consumption.

The result is the ability to improve equipment efficiency, increase material throughput and develop higher quality garments to extend product and equipment utility and reduce production costs.

International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that by 2025, 75% of organizations will deploy software tools on premises, in the cloud or at edge locations that monitor energy consumption. This will improve metrics and lead to reduced energy costs and improved sustainability (source: Industry Week).

Digital technology increases material savings with automated nesting software

Fashion companies that take advantage of cloud-based, automated nesting software can forecast their fabric consumption and associated development and preproduction costs with greater accuracy. This enables companies to optimize their manufacturing process by empowering executives with performance data to make resource optimization and waste reduction easier to implement, track and trace. Digitalization also enables fashion companies to identify areas of improvement by connecting the production line to a performance dashboard to track KPIs, increase agility and production speed to preserve margins and gain time savings.

"Digitalization creates a seamless data workflow and reduces the number of errors, time wasted and money spent, which today is vital to the health of any business" says Leonard Marano - President Americas, Lectra.

Conclusion

To preserve (or increase) margins and cater to consumers’ calls for more sustainable products, fashion companies should adopt digital solutions to minimize inventories on a scale broad enough to create a positive influence on cash flow. The latest digital solutions enable businesses to read and react faster to market trends, increase agility in their supply chain and accelerate speed to market.