A Fabric Resource Management System (FRMS) for Fashion Product Development

Introduction

The fashion industry is now facing a transformation due to the emergence of the fast fashion trend (Choy et al., 2009; Lee et al., 2013). Under the pressure brought by fast fashion, product life cycle and the speed to market of new products are getting shorter. In order to survive in the dynamic market, the effectiveness and efficiency of New Product Development (NPD) is of greater importance in today’s fashion industry. According to Frings (2008), NPD in the fashion industry covers a wide range of activities including market research, trend analysis, merchandising, design and product prototyping. Critical NPD decisions have to consider not only the desired product functionality, but also supply chain issues including sourcing vendors, selection of materials, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, as well as the determination of the products design technology (Petersen et al., 2005).Therefore, in order to expedite the NPD process, it is necessary to improve internal processes in a fashion enterprise as well as the connections with external parties across the textile-apparel supply chain.

In view of the fact that fabric selection is a crucial operation that affects the success of designing a new fashion product (Choy et al., 2009), increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of fabric management operation is one of the ways to improve internal processes in a fashion enterprise. In a fashion enterprise, the selection of fabrics is heavily relying on the knowledge and experience of individuals such as creative designers, product development managers and merchandisers (Lau et al., 2006), causing bias easily. In order to guarantee the decision quality in the fabric selection process, a management system is necessary to guide the decision makers when selecting appropriate fabrics for new products. In addition, choosing appropriate fabric suppliers is an important issue in NPD. Fabrics, on average, make up 70 percent of the material cost of a garment (Moon & Ngai, 2010). Therefore, fabric sourcing can affect the profitability of a fashion business. As customers are now looking for products which are of high quality with low cost, fabric modifications are common in many cases so as to fulfill customer expectation. Unfortunately, the fabric evaluation and modification process may occur several times until the prototype is fully satisfactory in terms of cost, performance, and consumers’ reaction (Kadolph, 2007). In order to respond to the market changes, fashion enterprises are expected to build a closer connection with potential parties in the supply chain such as the fabric suppliers.

In view of the above highlighted market needs, the objective of this chapter is to present a Fabric Resource Management System (FRMS) for fashion product development. Such system has embedded the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) technology to support the knowledge manipulation involved in the selection of fabric swatches and suppliers during the fashion product development process.