Inter-company integration via Internet, why?

• The competitiveness depends upon the performances of the whole supply chain.

• The Textile/Clothing supply chain is long, fragmented, heterogeneus and continuously evolving.

• The flexibility and timeliness of the supply chain are decisive.

• SMEs add high specialisation and productive flexibility to the system.

But the flow of data are hampered by the inter-company interfaces and by the difficulties for the organisations to manage ICT technologies.

A pubblic, standard format to exchange data, why?

• Every firm has relationships with many partners and building and manage a different interface towards each of them is unfeasible (or extremely costly)

• A common standard simplifies the relationships with international partners

• The adoption of a common non-proprietary interface saves costs and avoids to be constrained to a specific supplier.

Samples of the benefits of a better integration:

• The data of the purchase orders are available on digital systems without manual inputing (ad drastically reducing errors).

• The fabric supplier receives collection booking notes from the clothing manufacturers and can improve its production planning.

• The clothing manufacturer receives the order status report from the fabric supplier, can improve its planning and receives a digital defects map, ready for his machinery.

• The sell-out data flow back along the supply chain.