Buyers try to create panic to aggravate the off-season to push their orders at the lowest possible price.
Bangladesh is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world currently and estimates suggest that it will be the 28th and 23rd largest economy by 2030 and 2050, respectively, from its 43rd position currently.
What are the opportunities and challenges ahead?
Bangladesh’s government has increased workers’ minimum wage to 51% to ensure a better life for the workers at the end of last year. Enforcement of the new wage and overall cost for restitution on safety work have increased production cost by almost 20% in the last few years.
But the buyers of brands are not considering this issue while they place an order to buy products, rather, they are using tricky tactics to reduce the price through various mechanisms, which leading the situation to a worse position. Textile and Apparel owners sometimes get worried that lead them to reduce the price more and more.
Bangladesh is the second-largest apparel exporters after China. Though the volume base order never creates a business without a good margin, however, sometimes owners are taking the order without margin just to continue the production line.
Bangladeshi garment exporters have been receiving some of the lowest prices in the world, whereas they have been spending millions of US dollars for strengthening workplace safety and for better compliance.
They think this will help at least to reduce loss, or this is better than having no order at all. Most of the big brands now understand the weakness of the Bangladeshi RMG owners and know how to handle them. Brands are now using some sort of mechanisms to create a panic situation and push to lower the price.
Opportunities arising
Bangladesh has had remarkable success in exporting ready-made garments (RMG). Bangladesh is a beneficiary of the demographic dividend but skills mismatch holds the productivity levels back. Our country has a large pool of unskilled workforce.
But recently RMG sectors are providing on the job training so that they can serve one level up and increase efficiency.
Integrate with technology can be the proper solution as the manual process slows down the production a bit. The truth is that globally there are not many big production units to do big volume except China. If Bangladesh is not making a big volume of order then the panic situation and the crisis moment can be easily handled by the Bangladeshi manufacturers if they are out of panic for losing the order.
Solutions
CUTRACKER is barcode enabled bundle card generation and management tools for managing and tracking all information in cutting sections in garments. Manually you may be using more than 10 persons for writing manual bundle cards on the fabric where you will only one person to generate automated barcode enabled bundle card by using CUTRACKER.
From the cutting section, an operator just inserts basic order information like the buyer, order, color, size, etc. After receiving a lay chart from the cutting table he generates barcode enabled bundle card. After printing the bundle card he binds this bundle card to the fabric bundle. All kinds of report will auto-generate. No manual reports needed.
After that QC Inspectors check that and send it to cutting inventory/sewing input.
In conclusion, considering the whole scenario Textile and Apparel owners need to improve their negotiation skills and try to integrate their factories with technologies for better support and better production.
