Since 1979, specialty textile manufacturer Dowi Hosiery Mills has produced durable, comfortable socks and hosiery for the Philippine market, selling brands such as Darlington and Exped. Dowi’s nearly 100 retail partners include such prominent names as SM, Robinsons and Landmark.
Each retailer has its own requirements for order integration and data transparency, and their individual needs keep growing more sophisticated every day. For years, Dowi operated its business on homegrown, custom software and databases, but with increasingly complicated demands from retailers, the old system could not keep up with the pressure.
The company felt that software limitations harmed the company’s ability to strengthen its retail relationships, and made it difficult to accurately match manufacturing output with demand.
Marvin Tan, VP for operations at Dowi Hosiery Mills says, “Our old software required too many clicks and actions to complete basic transactions, which led to numerous delays.”
In September, 2014, Dowi Hosiery Mills implemented NetSuite to streamline and modernize key business processes. In place of a multitude of legacy, homegrown, custom software systems, manual processes and multiple databases, Dowi chose NetSuite for a native cloud ERP solution over several competing on-premise solutions.
Dowi Hosiery Mills now uses NetSuite for financials, order management, invoicing, billing, purchasing, receiving, shipping, RMA management, multi-location inventory, reporting and analytics.
The company fully appreciates that its initial expectations on the key features and benefits of NetSuite ERP are now producing real results that power Dowi’s continuing success.
NetSuite ERP is able meet the requirements of growth-driven Dowi Hosiery Mills in terms of:
• Multi-location inventory management. Dowi Hosiery Mills runs its operations with full transparency across all warehouses and stores, helping it track real-time supply and demand. This transparency helps the company anticipate and prepare for re-orders as well as monitor inventory at distributor and retail locations.
• Rapid implementation. Dowi Hosiery Mills was able to go live on NetSuite within a few months, speeding time to value proposition.
• Native cloud solution. The company no longer has to endure version lock, painful upgrades and maintain on-premise systems. Instead, Dowi gets automatic product upgrades twice a year on a platform that allows easy customizations and integration.
• Data-driven decisions. With a unified platform, Dowi Hosiery Mills has real-time access to a single source of data across its entire enterprise so management can quickly make more informed decisions.
• Efficient user interface. NetSuite’s intuitive, easy-to-use design makes users much more productive, both in day-to-day use and when processing complex transactions
• Real-time business visibility and business intelligence. With NetSuite, Dowi Hosiery Mills gains real-time insights into key business performance indicators from a unified view across the head office and its subsidiaries.
With NetSuite Cloud ERP, Dowi is able to improve operational efficiency and productivity as well as gain the scalability to grow its business. The company also notes that NetSuite helped accelerate the path to market for new lines of socks with high-tech fibers even as it enabled the delivery of much better service to Dowi’s retail partners.
Furthermore, Dowi Hosiery saved on the deployment of eight additional full-time employees just to keep up with the order processing and inventory tracking demands under the old system.
“With NetSuite, we can keep track of our entire inventory at the click of a button, and we never have to worry about servers or software,” Tan observes. “Everything we need to run our business is easy to see and operate, and we can access our solution from anywhere.”
