Pacific Alliance Aims to Improve Work-in-Progress Visibility

Apparel manufacturer taps TradeStone solution to beef up order delivery, work more efficiently with major retailers

Apparel manufacturer taps TradeStone solution to beef up order delivery, work more efficiently with major retailers

Gloucester, MA  June 7, 2005  Apparel manufacturer The Pacific Alliance has signed on to use sourcing and order management solutions from TradeStone Software to work more efficiently with key retail customers and be better positioned to integrate manufacturing facilities acquired as part of its merger with DonnKenny.

The Pacific Alliance, an apparel manufacturer based in New York, purchased the Unified Buying Engine and the TradeStone Unified Order Management module to work more efficiently with key retail customers and be better positioned to integrate manufacturing facilities acquired as part of its merger with DonnKenny.

Pacific Alliance plans to use TradeStone to improve its work-in-progress (WIP) visibility at the factory level, especially in the quality assurance and quality control (QC) areas. The ultimate goal is to improve order delivery as its designers and global manufacturing plants work closely with key retail customers, including J.C. Penney and Kohl's department stores.

TradeStone said its Unified Buying Engine offers a technology platform that enables companies to streamline all purchasing into one view and business process by offering visibility deep into the supply chain. It does this by aggregating operations such as managing reporting and queries, alerting for exceptions, critical path management, best practice modeling, workflow and collaboration.

The Unified Order Management module was designed to track finished goods, raw materials, blanket orders and aggregations by customer, channel or store type, enabling quality assurance, vendor and channel management and planning, according to TradeStone. It also supports the creation of smaller, more frequent orders, giving retailers the ability to respond to sales data and changing market conditions.

Jake Pleeter, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Pacific Alliance, said that the company selected TradeStone's software for the solution's ability to layer across Pacific Alliance's current enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, unify the company's visibility and reporting of WIP and QC, and enable Pacific Alliance to collaborate internally between departments and with all of its suppliers, including those overseas.

"The breadth and depth of TradeStone's team expertise in unified management is important to us," Pleeter added. "We'll benefit from a timely implementation and also be building the foundation for a stronger infrastructure as Pacific Alliance continues to grow and prosper."

TradeStone Software CEO Sue Welch said that Pacific Alliance would be an important strategic account for the solution provider. "They are recognized fast turnaround fashion manufacturers who are growing rapidly both organically and through acquisition," she said. "We are delighted to be Pacific Alliance's software provider of choice as they incorporate their recent acquisition, expand their overseas manufacturing, and deliver high quality fashion apparel to their retail customers.


Additional Articles of Interest

The focus in the retail sector has shifted from managing the movement of goods to managing information about goods. Read more in "Ramping Up the Retail Supply Chain," in the February/March 2005 issue of Supply & Demand Chain Executive.

 For more information on the challenges and opportunities presented by increasingly global supply chains, see the special in-depth report in the August/September 2004 issue of Supply & Demand Chain Executive, which includes the following articles:


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