Cloud Computing for Managing Apparel and Garment Supply Chains - an Empirical study of Implementation Frame Work
With operating efficiencies already quite high, members of the apparel and manufacturing supply chain need to look at strategies other than reducing labor costs to improve margins. The key area is collaboration with supply chain partners. Collaboration offers an opportunity to reduce costs in the supply chain in the areas of product development, inventory holding, and manufacturing through better capacity utilization, lower reject rates, fewer charge-backs and profitability. Apparel and garment industry is highly fickle and are characterized by short life cycles, unpredictable demand, whimsical consumers, multiple trading partners, difficulties in doing cross-border trade and stagnating economic conditions. Information Technology enabled collaboration should be the key area for tackling the hurdles in this regard. Cloud computing as an IT enabled option for model for delivering on-demand, self-service computing resources with ubiquitous network access, location-independent resource pooling, and rapid elasticity. In order to make the supply chain efficient, collaboration among partners is becoming a necessity. Retailers should prefer to form partnerships with suppliers who have gone ahead and implemented processes and systems which facilitate collaboration. In this paper, an empirical study of adaptability of Cloud computing model for apparel and garment manufacturers to achieve collaboration among the supply chain partners to manage the Supply Chain is presented.
Keywords: Cloud Computing, SCM, Collaboration, cloud computing framework
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