Decision support system for sample development in the Hong Kong garment industry

In today's garment industry, speed to market is important considering the fast fashion trend. In particular, the efficiency of new product development (NPD) is critical in gaining competitive advantages. The garment industry is material intensive, thus making it more difficult for merchandisers to ensure material availability for sample development compared with other manufacturing industries. Conventionally, when materials with a long lead time affect the sample-making progress, merchandisers formulate action plans based solely on experience. Without any knowledge support for merchandising operations, these merchandisers may fail to make wise decisions, resulting in a long sample development cycle and poor customer satisfaction. The current paper proposes a sample development decision support system to provide knowledge support for sample development. The present study attempts to use rule-based reasoning for determining sample-making operation lead times and material delay times for sample making, followed by case-based reasoning to support the knowledge manipulation involved in sample order processing. After a pilot study in a Hong Kong garment company, the proposed system is found to help accelerate NPD processes by considering both material arrival dates and sample delivery dates to provide merchandisers with suggested guidelines in the sample development process.