The fashion industry is one of the fastest-paced industries in the market right now. New collections are being released more frequently, the entire industry is gearing up for big changes sooner than ever, and the market itself is at its most competitive right now. There are a lot of new players too, so it is not surprising to see competition becoming tighter.
Staying ahead of the market requires creative thinking and new approaches. Sticking to the conventional way of managing tasks and projects is no longer enough. With new product development being the key component, fashion companies must be able to adapt to changes happening in the industry faster. This is where setting up efficient workflows become essentially important.
Start with the Basics
Setting up workflows for the purpose of speeding up product development without sacrificing accuracy, quality, and creativity starts with the big processes. You want to create workflows that govern how products are designed, reviewed, and then pushed for production.
To do that, look at the very basic components of your production process i.e. what you are doing right now. Convert existing workflows into charts or visualization so that you can analyze them better. This is the first step towards finding new ways to optimize processes.
The current way of doing things includes your current workflows, even when you don’t see them as a standardized set of processes. Identifying them will also help you spot the root of problems you currently face – we will get to this in a bit.
Spot Delays and Bottlenecks
With the current processes mapped, it is time to do a thorough review to find bottlenecks. You will see delays in certain parts of the process, whether it is in the design phase or when the product gets pushed for review and production.
These bottlenecks must be solved, and there are several ways to solve them. For example, you can solve delays in production by working with additional production partners and expanding your manufacturing capacity.
The same is true with issues with the design process. Minimizing revisions by getting decision-makers involved earlier in the process is a great way to become more agile in an already challenging industry. At the very least, you can release better products faster.
Visualize!
Sticking with visualization as a theme, implement the Kanban system as a way to visualize your workflows even before you begin to design new ones. Tools like Kanbanize are perfect for managing tasks in complex projects. Kanbanize offers a lot of flexibility to leverage.
The Kanban system basically converts tasks into Kanban cards. When you use Kanbanize to organize tasks, you can see the agile process flow displayed on the board, complete with all the necessary details. You can also customize the board to better suit your workflows.
Visualized tasks are easier to manage. You can also define a much better set of workflows when existing tasks are already visualized. You can see how cards move from one phase to another, and then define how to best improve the process.
Inject the Right Values
There is another substantial benefit of visualizing tasks using the Kanban system: you immediately make every task – every process within the company – transparent. Transparency is an important value to inject into your workflows.
Naturally, it is not the only value to add in order to be agile; you also want to inject accountability as a value. With cards assigned to certain team members, developing a higher sense of ownership and accountability is a lot easier to do.
At the same time, you also want to improve collaboration. This too is something that can be done by letting all team members see tasks in their visual form. Team members can start offering help, take a more active stance in managing tasks, and collaborate more.
Create a Cycle
The most important part of the process, however, is establishing workflows as cycles. Being agile means actively looking for ways to improve, and the only way you can effectively do that is by learning from past projects.
Workflows need to follow the PDCA format – plan, do, check, act. From the way each part is organized, you can immediately see that planning is the foundation of the whole process, and that reviews are not only done at the end of the process.
Once again, you also have the freedom to customize cycles to better suit your needs. The basic principles are the same, but you can add steps, adjust the way each step is completed, and create templates for repetitive tasks to speed things up.
Getting Started
Establishing efficient workflows is easy once you have these tips and tricks implemented. By the time you start creating well-defined cycles for different processes, you already know how to push for maximum agility and efficiency at the same time. The rest – including staying competitive in the market – is easy from there.
