Inherited Business Model
With the business focused on product & retail, it relied heavily on local trading agents who represented a range of factories from China, across the full range of product categories.
As the agents provided no substantial product or fabric design intelligence, their role was focused on facilitation, including production and lead time management.
Our business model created multiple variations across base fabric qualities and workmanship standards. Many of the agents worked via trading companies creating layers of cost, as well as a lack of transparency across the supply chain.
The introduction of Trace SCI Founder Stephen Early as GM to manage Offshore Sourcing resulted in substantial improvement to the sourcing process, including:
- establish relationships direct with factories and fabric mills
- mill relationships provided consistency of quality, and volumes purchased provided cost benefits
- reduce layers in supply chain
- enhancing transparency in supply chain
- consolidating the number of ports goods were shipped from, resulting in 95% improvement in container utilisation
- reducing cost price through direct and alternate sourcing arrangements
- diversified supply chain to Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia
Over time, supply chain traceability and transparency tracking were established with:
- factory audits
- social & ethical compliance standards
- fabric test standards and audits
- during production (supplier source validation) and pre shipment, product quality inspection
- creating multiple layers of data capture / product - supplier performance
- environmental accreditation of fabric suppliers enabling supply chain transparency and ESG data collation
As Traceability & Transparency became a Corporate & Social Responsibility issue, RAG was well placed to comply with Legislative & social conscious disruptors demands, comparative to other apparel retailers in Australia
Ongoing benefits of Supply Chain Traceability program:
- heat map supply chain to assess risk
- simpler legislative compliance to MSA
- quality consistency = customer satisfaction
In addition to 20+ years in product and supply chain development, the experience gained from Retail Apparel Group
- conceiving and implementing the business models framework
- establishing third party service providers / IT teams to align with RAG systems
- onboarding RAG suppliers and securing / auditing reported data
