THE OLD AND THE NEW
(October 2003 article in apparel, reproduced with permission)

Despite being New Zealands oldest established knitwear manufacturer, Manawatu Knitting Mills boasts some of Australia’s leading production technology in its field and today the company exports to Australia and as far afield as the USA and Asia.

Remaining competitive in the ever-changing apparel market means staying abreast of innovations in every area of the business and just over a decade ago the company was one of the first in the country to adopt New Zealand designed and developed apparel industry specific FABRIX production and management software system.

“We found that FABRIX was just a far more user- friendly and all-encompassing system than other similar packages available on the market, and the back-up from DDNC is very good,” says Manawatu Knitting Mills managing director, John Hughes.

With more than 50 employees based at his Palmerston North production facility, Hughes says that FABRIX’s easy operation was a vital consideration given that his employees are in daily contact with the system and first arrive at the company with varying levels of computer literacy.

“They’re dependant on it for the job sheets, job issue – everything. We use it for marketing, administration, production, production analysis , production issuing and we have bar code trace ability throughout the production plant. It all feeds through FABRIX – warehousing, inventory, stock control and even profit and loss.

“It’s a very effective management tool and it’s improved our efficiency and decision making, because we have the ability to glean valuable information when we need to.”

As many exporters now establish sub-companies to separate and streamline their various offshore operations, the FABRIX system enables users to attribute each entry to its country of origin for the easy management of sales and the collection of offshore accounts.

“We can integrate all the sales information from other countries that we deal with into our main system,” says Hughes, who is more than happy to stick with FABRIX in taking this stalwart of the industry well into the future. 

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