A case study on Raymonds Supply Chain

The various brands under the Raymonds umbrella are: Park Avenue, Colorplus, Parx, Notting Hill, Manzoni etc. The company is one of the largest integrated manufacturers of worsted fabric in the world and commands a 60% market share in India. Raymonds in India has huge plans of expansion in the retail segment. With this in mind huge investments have been made at its existing plant at Vapi and investments have also been made to set up new manufacturing units at Bangalore and Kolhapur. This goes to show the increasing focus, the company has on distributing its manufacturing units across different regions in the country so as to be able to respond faster to the customer demands.

According to Mr. Gautham Singania, the Chairman and Managing Director of the group, “The difficult part we face is getting the right supply mechanism for materials and the manpower to improve the efficiencies in delivery of the product.” A unique feature of the Raymonds supply chain is the launch of Extranet - a B2B e commerce channel. The thought behind this introduction is to connect the company’s marketing and sales teams with its external business partners like dealers, agents, franchisees in the textile business division. Through this they believe they can speed up and improve the distribution channels across the country. This will give them more flexibility and enable the stockists to place their orders directly on the net. The Raymond Apparel Ltd. a complete subsidiary of Raymond Ltd. has also implemented a supply chain management package based on the Oracle platform. With this, they hope to smoothen out both ends of the supply chain.

Unlike some other garment companies in the industry, Raymonds Ltd. has configured its supply chain based on a pull system. The customers can pull what they want from the manufacturing base of Raymond through dealer based distribution networks. Raymonds has a supply chain that is a vertically integrated composite network of different operations that produces only as per the demand. The problem this could have is increased lead times and fails to address the challenge of quick response to customer demands. Increasing product variety makes the problem even worse.