Barcoder drives success at Stallion Garments

Usha Prasad

Stallion Garments, situated in the heart of the textile cluster of South India, Tirupur, has traversed a successful journey for two decades. The company, which manufactures garments for ladies, gents and kids, is all set to face stiff global competition and meet the challenges of being on par with international products, compliance and reduced price margins.

Established in 1986, Stallion has worked to be a force in the global apparel industry. With KAS Thierumurthi as the CEO of Stallion Graments, is also the treasurer of Tirupur Exporters' Association, a hard working workforce, best infrastructure and state-of-the-art technology in place, the company has been able to reap success.

Stallion, which handles knitting of 100 percent cotton, cotton blends, mercerized cotton, 100 percent polyester and other man made fibers, is equipped with computer controlled jacquard machine, rib and interlocking knitting machine, auto stripper and collar knitting.

As a ISO 9001:2000 company, Stallion exports its products to USA and Europe. "We have a Yarn to Fabric vertical setup and our dye-house meets the social responsibility norms by installing the Reverse-Osmosis purification plant," he adds.

In modern day business scenario, growing companies have to rely upon information technology for improved work processes, better performance and suitable return on investment, says C R Krishnamurthy, Corporate IT Head, Stallion Garments.

Krishnamurthy has been spearheading the IT implementation at Stallion Garments and holds the responsibility of ensuring updated IT support to the whole corporate.

"We have implemented SAP - ERP successfully on IBM - Aix based servers. Recently we have received a certification from Norsel for successfully implementing their labeling barcode printer with the existing workflow for the first time in India," he adds.

Successful adoption of barcoders

All along, Stallion Garments faced an acute problem of unauthorized cutting of fabric and found it difficult to mange the tracking of lots in the cutting department.

Explaining how the company overcame this problem with the use of barcoder, Krishnamurthy says, "Previously resorted to manual writing. However, it was found that this could be altered during cutting of fabric and also during the dyeing process. Then I had an idea to barcode the fabric even before the cutting process using a mechanized barcoder." "The barcode was be done on both ends of the fabric before it underwent the cutting process. This way there was no chance for it to be altered either during the cutting process or the dyeing process."

"This was truly an unique idea. Apart from preventing unauthorized cutting, this ensured proper identification of the lot and Sales Order number. The Barcode sticker, which was attached at both ends of the grey fabric before it went for dyeing, could not be removed during cutting or after. This led to a remarkable cut down in the production costs,' explains Krishnamurthy.

The challenge lay in the fact that this had never been done in India in the garment industry. Thus far, barcodes were used only on the finished product and not on a fabric that was still at one of the production stages.

We decided to import the barcoder from Norsel Textilmaschinenag, Switzerland.
Stallion Garments is the first company in India to implement barcodes at the production level itself. The emerging success story caught the attention of other companies and we started receiving inquiries regarding this new system of lot tracking, he says.

Further, our software engineers have locally developed a software to execute the whole process to be integrated with SAP without any assistance from any software experts. "It had been a major challenge challenge for them and today the success story is before all to see," Krishnamurthy says.

'Success is a product of hardwork' - We all strongly believe in, he says.

CIOL Bureau