First company to implement SAP in Textiles and Apparels

Viyellatex implements SAP in Target Time

Kamal Arsalan
Viyellatex has become the first ever company to implement the world renowned SAP
ERP Solution in one shot through a single project with stringy
deadline for managing its total operations of the entire supply
chain covering textiles, apparel and all peripheral businesses.
Viyellatex is the first company to achieve such a fit in terms of
implementing SAP for 5 business units meant for 5 different
manufacturing processes and entirely varied business cultures
not only locally, also probably globally.
Viyellatex Group, a global standard Bangladeshi concern is a
leading export-oriented Apparel manufacturer of the country.
Starting the operation from a meager $ 200,000 in 1996, David Hasanat, Chairman
Viyellatex has now reached a highly impressive target of $ and CEO of Viyellatex
125,000,000 in 2007-2008 in a span of 11 years. The man
behind the spectacular growth of the Group is K. M. Rezaul Hasanat, widely known as
David Hasanat.
The core impetus for selecting SAP as the solution for resolving the typical problems that
entangle any such complicated manufacturing
business, such as, high and unplanned inventories,
unavailability of the critical materials in the midst
of operations resulting in total chaos, high
wastage, so on and so forth. If we could reduce
5% of our average 30% wastage, that would alone
pay for the investment planned to be made for the
implementation of SAP, says David Hasanat,
Chairman and CEO of the Group.
Hasanat is a very determined, farsighted and a
visionary entrepreneur in the RMG sector of the
country. Being an industrialist of the 21st century
Corporate office of Viyellatex
he realized that the basic tool for attaining global
standard management efficiency is harnessing the power of IT. In the beginning he
started using a couple of locally developed software for automating some of the
operational activities.
With rapid and fast growth of the company, Hasanat felt the necessity of more powerful
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for streamlining all activities of the
1

organization. Hence, initiatives were taken to implement SAP ERP solution- worlds
most widely used business solution to run the companys businesses. SAP delivers
products and services to almost all types of industries in 120 countries for streamlining
business activities in todays challenging environment.
The base software was procured during the early part of the year 2008 and the German
based SAP Implementation Partner Attune Consulting having expertise in apparel
operational requirements was engaged for the purpose of implementation of extremely
complex solution through critical designing of the templates and linked parameterization
to match with the business needs. Attune Consulting deployed a team of 6 consultants
from Sri Lanka and India in the project. The project with a name Gateway ran the total
implementation over a period of six and a half months.
Starting from the very beginning of Viyellatexs business value chain operations,
importation of raw cotton as per planned cycles all the ways through spinning, knitting,
dyeing and finishing, cutting, sewing, printing, embroidery, washing, accessories and all
other knitty-gritty of garments manufacturing are now thoroughly managed by SAPs
highly process-oriented and
automated processes. Be it
Made-to-Order or Made-toStock, total management of sales
contracts vis--vis sales orders,
bills of materials, material
requirements planning and their
procurements
along
with
absolutely assured and timely
availability, production planning,
routing, cost center maintenance,
accounting including all kinds of
productivity and profitability
analyses are performed by the
newly
SAP.

implemented

solution

David Hasanat, Chairman & CEO, M. A. Matin,

Project Director and Ahasan Kabir Khan, Vice
Chairman in the newly established State-of-Art Data
Center

Viyellatex is one of the single largest knit garment industries in the country. At present its
manufacturing plants have more than 100 lines with a capacity of 2.5 to 3.0 million
pieces readymade garments per month. Under the umbrella of Viyellatex Group there are
5 independent business units, which are Viyellatex Spinning Limited, Viyellatex
Garments Limited, Interfab Shirts Manufacturing Limited, Gothic Design Limited and
Fashion Plastic & Packaging Limited. In addition, it has a knit composite unit, dyeing,
washing, cutting. sewing and finishing divisions. The workforce of the Group is more
than 11,000.

The international partners of Viyellatex consists of G-Star, Marks & Spencer, PUMA,
GERRY WEBER, Espirit, S. Oliver, Philip Van Heusen, Calvin Klein and a number of
other global brands.

The challenging task of implementation of SAP in this huge plant with a wide variety of
business and production activities was given to M A Matin, a leading IT and Business
consultant of the country as the Project Director .He developed a technical team of young
talented
professionals
and groomed them up to
manage different aspects
of the process. The team
was formed by deploying
a
number
of
professionals
from
different departments of
the organization and also
by
recruiting
from
external sources.
A powerful IBM server
System i570, the largest
of its kind in Bangladesh
having storage capacity
of 3000GB has been
installed in the newly
developed
state-of-art
Data Center. The total network infrastructures have been developed based on the
extremely well-designed function-oriented all-Cisco-centric VLANs and implementation
of high-end Firewall and Active Directory Domain Services.
David Hasanat, Chairman & CEO initiating the Go Live for the
use of SAP. Project Director M. A. Matin looks on

Process Improvement, Simplification or even re-engineering have been the principal

challenge in the project. The company quite voluntarily accepted the challenge and have
already started receiving the pay-offs and bottom-line benefits, says Matin. In every
aspect of the implementation process, I instilled a process of initiating the steps,
following them up and attaining the targeted goals and it all happened with or without
hiccups, he added.
All the 4 core modules of SAP, namely, Sales & Distribution, Production Planning,
Materials Management and Finance & Control were implemented in one shot. 4 separate
core implementation teams carried out the implementation methodologies as devised by
SAP, Realization (requirement mobilization), Mapping the solution to suite with business
needs, Gap Analysis and devising the workaround methods, User Acceptance Testing
(UAT) both modular and integrated and most tiresome data mobilization including the
Burn your Hands learning exercises. The project went Live absolutely as per plan and
exactly on the target date 14th day of December 2008.

For the purpose of data mobilization the team had to deal with huge amount of raw data
(in varied forms) which include hardcopy papers, spreadsheets, word documents, SQL
Server databases, Access databases. All members of the team including a large bunch of
end-users worked very hard and even sacrificing their Eid holidays to complete this
gigantic task in the specified target time.
Finally, functions of all 4 modules were combined into sequential processes which
covered
all
activities starting
from
sales
contracts
to
billing. Activities
such
as
L/C
opening,
production
planning,
procurements,
spinning, knitting,
dyeing, cutting,
manufacturing,
production of all
accessories,
billing
and
payment
formalities
are
conducted in this
Happy and smiling Core Implementation Team with David Hasanat,
end-to-end
Director Kaniz Fatema Zareen and M. A. Matin
process without
any overlapping of the concerned functions.

With the successful implementation of SAP, Viyellatex has reached a significant

milestone. The company expects that the present turnover will become double after 3
years (30% growth year on year). The process is supposed to continue even further and if
all goes well in the next 10
years Viyellatex will
emerge as a Billion Dollar
($1 Billion) Global Textile
and Apparel Industry with
a strong possibility of
making a history in the
RMG sector of the
country.
It is indeed a great
achievement
towards
Digital Bangladesh.

Project Director Matin with Attune Consultants. Standing (Left

to Right) Parbhu, Satya, Mohan Ram. Sitting (Left to Right)
Lakmal, Avilash, Hariharan