DESIGNED TO CUT TIME

摘要

If you're in the business of making a few million pairs of blue jeans a year, not much is more important than getting "blue" exactly right. It's why a jeans de-signer at VF Corp. will express mail swatches dipped in dye back and forth with factories around the world as many times as necessary to make sure design-ers and manufacturers agree on just the right shade. And it's part of the reason it takes as long as nine months to design a new pair of jeans and get them on the shelves. VF believes finding a more efficient way to agree on blue, and other technology-enabled improvements in how it designs new products and manages logistics, could save it $100 million a year and cut months off the time to get a new design to market. "If you look at the cycle tunes from design to retail shelf, about two-thirds is spent in product development," says Boyd Rogers, VF's VP of supply chain and technology. "The new system has the potential to remove months from the production cycle, depending how many iterations are made to get the correct color."