Dobotex International

Dobotex International has specialised in legwear for over 30 years. In the early years the products were mostly private labels for department stores like HEMA and V&D. Since the end of the 1990s, Dobotex has focused solely on brand name socks and is the exclusive licence partner for the PUMA and Tommy Hilfiger brands. The company has also been producing the bodywear for PUMA since the beginning of 2009.

Dobotex is a progressive chain manager and runs the entire show, from product development through delivery to the customer. Production mainly takes place in the Far East. All of the logistics are also handled internally, through logistics company ‘Dobologic’ for Europe and with strong distribution partners throughout the world. The list of customers varies from large department stores to small shops.

In the fashion industry the success factors not only include quality and attractiveness but also optimal logistics processes. Theo Braks, Director Operations: “We sell strong brands of high quality at reasonable prices. The likelihood that our products are purchased is high. But to sell, they have to hang in the stores! So we ensure that the display hooks are always filled with our products. This demands a good logistics system, and the computer systems play an important role in this.”

Solid IT system
“At Dobotex we believe in IT. In Europe alone, we deliver around 100 million socks per year. To handle that volume a solid IT system is essential. We found such a system in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. We mainly use IT to streamline our processes and ensure quick deliveries. After all, everything depends on perfect interaction with our customers’ processes.”

“In the past, we mainly drew our confidence from our inventory,” continues Braks. “For many years the thinking was: ‘As long as we have enough inventory we can always deliver.’ The result was that we had enormous product inventories. Over the years we have begun to draw that confidence less and less from inventory and more and more from information. If the information in your ERP system is good, you can use it to make decisions. Ultimately, Dynamics NAV is our reality. It encapsulates all our business processes. Because we now have confidence in our IT system, availability has improved and inventories have simultaneously been reduced.”

Checking orders
Thanks to extensive computerisation of the order handling process, Dobotex can deliver quickly. “Dynamics NAV has a particularly strong role when it comes to our ability to quickly pick and ship orders. Every order that arrives in Dynamics NAV is first checked for feasibility. Our rule is: accept only orders you can fill. Orders are checked for availability of the article and capacity. Thanks to this approach, our warehouse is almost always able to pick these orders.”

Quick delivery times
“Our warehouse is run by a Warehouse Management System,” tells Braks. “This system ensures that for every flow the products arrive at the right place at the right time. Our rapid order processing results in quick delivery times to our customers. In the past our delivery times ranged from two to four weeks. Since we began using Dynamics NAV we have reduced this to two to three days, for all of Europe.”

“Over time our IT system has been finely tuned to our business processes. This took a while. Step for step the translation was made from process to IT and vice versa. This was done in collaboration with Qurius. At present, Qurius is primarily a partner that helps us consider our approach for future developments. One of our specific reasons for choosing Qurius is that this party has a lot of expertise in the area of logistics.”

Virtual environment
In the near future, Dobotex’s entire IT environment will be hosted in the Qurius data centre in Den Bosch. The company is switching over to a completely virtual environment, in combination with central data storage. This decision was made because Dobotex is growing enormously and recently expanded its distribution of PUMA legwear and bodywear to the entire world. This placed even more weight on the requirement for a robust, secure IT environment. Braks: “A virtual environment offers us more flexibility and increased business continuity. This also makes it easy to upscale if that becomes necessary.”

Developments
“With an eye toward the future, I can say that we are busy with a number of developments. One possibility we are exploring is the automatic release of orders. Arriving orders will then be immediately forwarded to our warehouse and tested there against all the conditions we find important. An advantage is that we then gain even more speed in the order processing – and thus the delivery.”

“Another interesting development is that the gap between us and the consumer is continuously shrinking. In the department stores we are taking over the shelves and we want to deliver in response to sales, so the register transactions will be the trigger in our order processing system. An advantage of this is that it puts you even closer to the source, which increases your ability to keep those display hooks full!”

Challenge

• Streamlining the logistics processes
• Reduction of the product inventories
• Robust and secure IT environment

Solution

• Microsoft Dynamics NAV
• Virtual IT environment

Benefits

• Quicker order processing and delivery times
• Reduced inventory
• More flexibility and improved operational continuity