Content area
Full Text
1. Introduction
By today’s high competition, the pressure of global marketplace on organizations finding new ways to create and to deliver value to customers grows ever stronger. The forces of powerful market are demanding manufacturers transform their traditional way to satisfying consumer needs through process of production and delivery of goods. The characteristics of the fashion garment market include short lifecycles, high volatility, low predictability and high impulse purchases. The way to meet this challenge is through lead-time management to reduce the logistical lead-time and capture information simultaneously on actual customer requirements. The garment industry lead-time management established the speed-to-market (STM) model, using information technology, work improvement and re-engineering the supply chain process to shorten the garment manufacturing and lead-time of cloths purchasing.
2. Time compression from supply chain management (SCM) perspective
Adrian (1997) highlighted a new tool, “time-based process mapping” that formed part of the time compression programmed standard approach to time compression, as a practical way of establishing the time-based opportunities that exist in the business process. Time compression is a powerful source of competitive advantage. The key to achieving time compression is to remove waste and refocus the sequence of the activities so that time consuming is reduced for the total supply chain system. Juliana (2006) explored one way of reducing time-to-market through process transformation through services globalization and also explored the question: “How can process transformation be performed more effectively, more cheaply, and more quickly” to develop time-to-market supply chain networks, so “streamlining the rules of traditional process, exploring the short-supply list, and coordinating custom procedures” should be amended from the traditional systems (Oh and Kim, 2007). Business success is based on whether the enterprises reacted “faster than competitors,” and the enterprises should be responsive to the market change immediately, innovated process effectively and introduced new products or services faster than competitors (Johnson and Busbin, 2000). Antai (2011) evaluated competition from time series data to extent the competition between supply chains by ecological niche theory. Handfield (1993) surveyed 35 American and Canadian companies and suggested that the two major influences on design lead-time are product complexity and manufacturability.
SCM is defined in many ways, and many papers have been focus on the SCM researches (Defee et al., 2010; Schmenner and...