• Vimal Loganathan
• 31-Dec-2021

Workflow Management

In the apparel manufacturing industry, different types of testing and approvals are there at different stages. Approvals must set the process to ensure the issues are detected early and corrected, before moving to manufacturing. Ignoring the issues and failing to follow the process will cause a huge loss to the company. This problem will be there in any department such as Fabric, Designer, Printing, packing, etc.

Problem Statement:

The leading textile industry had a problem streamlining the garment design approval prior to the manufacturing division. There were scenarios reported such as design moving to the manufacturing line without any approval and lands in an expensive mistake zone. This is due to approval authorities being placed in different geographies and no direct contact with the manufacturing line. This creates chaos in the process. As of now, all the processes are happening using email that's not helping in any manner to solve their needs fully. Even during the approval process, lots of corrections will be made, but can't ensure all those are done before the next step. So, the customer wants to have a solution that has the process flow and the tracker for the changes to the design.

Our Solution:

The tech stack preferred by our client is SharePoint Online and they have Azure Web app service subscription as well. RMM analyzed the problem statement and came up with a hybrid approach App Model way to solve this issue. Since the requirement requires lots of items to be stored and reporting is extensively required, SharePoint is used as a launch platform and lists are used for storage. We designed a workflow engine where the flows can be created dynamically and assign people for task handling. Each task will have lots of features such as Checklists for task completion, a Design annotation option, annotated change tracker option. Apart from all these, reporting was also created to fetch data based on constraints.

Approval Workflow Features

• Dynamic workflow setup

• Task checklists

• Task Manager

• Dashboard with Current status approval

• Design annotation

• Reminder and Escalation

• Application management

The Benefits of Approval Workflow

• 0 Skips to Manufacturing phase before approval

• Increased Productivity

• Transparency & Control

• Annotation tracker

• On-time completion

• Reports

The application lifecycle:

The design team will create a design approval request and upload the design images.

Based on the design type specific workflow will trigger and route the process. During this, email notifications to all approvers are taken care. Approvals can be serial or parallel! 2 or more workflow tasks can be assigned to different teams at the same level of workflow stage. This saves time and speeds up the process.

During the approval closure, authorities are requested to complete the checklist to ensure the quality of tasks is taken carefully. If any tasks are delayed, reminder emails will be sent to the task owners daily or based on the configurable schedule to remind them.

If any change is needed in the design, the user can easily pinpoint that in the design directly by annotation controls. Refer to the banner image for example, citing annotation on the image. Annotation can be an error, information, or warning. All these annotations will be recorded for the responses from the design author. design author can directly reply to the annotations to create a history of discussion on a specific point.

Conclusion:

Every business workflow is an integral part of the day-to-day operation. Every business is keen on finding ways to automate their workflow; we have tools to make it nice and simple! In case you have any requirements similar to any workflow, we are there to help you.

Please let me know for further discussion.

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