Production Administration

High Level Activities / Processing

Job Order Activities

1. Receive Customer Order
2. Sanity Check Order
3. Transcribe Customer Order into Internal TOT Job order
4. Capture Key Date Requirements
5. Create required internal process records and required dates
6. Ensure each process record has technical specification to hold detailed process instructions
7. Assign process records to applicable departments
8. Record Garment Requirements for Order
9. Organise Garment Availability for Order
10. Create Stock Orders for Job as required
11. Ring fence Garment requirements to order to prevent double booking/usage
12. Record Fulfilment Requirements
13. Reconcile Internally transcribed order to customer order and raise once fully checked
14. Confirm fully written / priced up order to customer

Miscellaneous Purchase Order Related Activities

1. Raise Purchase Orders with suppliers to support job order requirements (both TOT and Customer supply)
2. Raise Purchase Orders with suppliers for general stock holdings (both TOT and Customer supply)
3. Raise Purchase Orders for 3rd party items (miscellaneous items, tour returns) as requested by Customers
4. Load in Order confirmations placed and ensure order placed is correct for qty and price

Processing Order Amendments

1. Adding / Deleting / Amending Processes
2. Amending Garment Requirements
3. Amending Despatch Requirements
4. Cancelling Orders as directed

Miscellaneous Customer Administration

1. Create Fulfilments (3rd party reseller) for stock held on behalf of customer
2. Create PO's and Fulfilments for blank stock (i.e. TOT purchases  on behalf of customer and has it delivered direct to customer)

Miscellaneous Inventory Administration

1. Populate Supplier reference codes for internal SKU's to support API based PO processing

Mistakes Recording / Updating

1. Create / raise mistake records as necessary

Inputs

Outputs

Current Processing Flow

Job Order Processing

Receipt of Customer Order

1. Customer orders are received by email (TOT working practice mandates this as the  communication channel)
2. Production administration sanity check the received order for key attributes - sizing / date requirements to reasonably determine that sufficient production capacity exists to service the order
3. In respect of capacity  - Production Admin will liaise with Production Management to establish current capacity level

Transcribe Customer Order: Capture Key Dates & Credit Validation

1. Production administration first check to see if the customer order has previously been executed. If so, the historic record can be duplicated as a subsequent stroke reference and the duplicate amended per the current order
2. Assuming no prior order record found, Production Admin create a new order record
3. All client received order information (email correspondence) is attached to the record
4. Initial key information is first captured so that the record is available to the Production management department for scheduling / capacity purposes
   1. Date Required, Date Required Additional Notes. Client, Client Ref,Description, category
5. Having initially captured key client and date information, responsibility to complete transcribing the order is assigned to a Production Admin staff member. This allows allocation of workload amongst members
6. Before proceeding further, Production Administration will perform a rudimentary credit validation of the client to determine whether authorisation is required to proceed. This is done via client colour coding which is manually retrospectively performed via the Accounts Department. There is therefore credit risk that orders can be processed before the colour coding is applied.

Transcribe Customer Order: Capture Order Process Information

1. The customer order is broken down into the required internal processes necessary to produce the order
2. For each required process, Production Management assign a responsible department and other key information - such as Qty, Tooling and Process Date
3. For each process record created, Production administration ensure that technical specification information is available - either linking to an existing specification record (if exists and suitable) or creating a placeholder record.
4. Where the process required has an art requirement  - creation of the process record with required dates alerts the art department of forthcoming workload

Transcribe Customer Order: Garment Requirements

1. Once process level information has been captured, Production Administration capture Garment Requirements
2. Garment requirements are organised per set of processes and include the input "blank" garment requirements broken down by various dimensions as well as the corresponding output requirements - if not existing the output garment requirements form new SKUs
3. Quantities of each unique input garment set are recorded along with pricing data. Quantities specified here will form picking requirements warehouse picking staff.
4. As part of this process, Production admin will organise the source for the input garment requirements. There are various common scenarios for this which are summarised below together with their current processing method.

Transcribe Customer Order: Despatch Requirements

1. Once process level information has been captured, Production Administration capture Despatch Requirements
2. Should the customer not have supplied despatch requirements, Production Administration notify the client to provide them
3. The client can elect to provide despatch requirements via:-
   1.  email: in which case Production administration will create the necessary despatch information records
   2. customer portal: in which case client inputs their despatch information which creates the necessary internal despatch records

Transcribe Customer Order: Reconciliation of Order

1. Production Administration validate / reconcile the customer order received to the transcribed internal version
2. Assuming successful validation the order is regarded as raised - which denotes that the required production processes to service the order can occur
3. Worth noting that should any credit validation situation exist, Production Admin will not raise the job but keep it on hold until approval provided to remedy credit fail.

Confirm fully written / priced up order to customer

1. Once Production Administration have raised the customer order they communicate this back to the customer contact.
2. This is done via email and contains all the process, delivery and other price elements of the order.
3. This is an opt in process - i.e. production admin decide whether to send the communication or not

Miscellaneous Purchase Order Related Activities

Raise Purchase Orders with suppliers to support job order requirements (both TOT and Customer supply)

1. Production Administration create (and for TOT ownership place orders with suppliers) purchase order records for garment requirements for job orders.
2. Purchase Orders raised in this way are associated to the "requiring"  job order so upon receipt of the corresponding delivery, Goods In staff process the receipt for the requiring job

Raise Purchase Orders with suppliers for general stock holdings (both TOT and Customer supply)

1. Production Management also place orders for general TOT stock holdings
2. This is done based on existing stock levels, knowledge or popular / common garments and expectations of future client orders
3. Production Management also raise orders for garments for other departments (e.g. Webstores) to consolidate department requirements into central order
4. Clients can also request TOT to order garments on their behalf either for stock holding and/or for despatch. Production administration service these requests by raising the corresponding Purchase Order and Fulfilment Records. As purchase orders in this manner are for client ownership, and paid for by TOT, manual invoices are raised against the client for the PO cost

New Requirement: Ability for Clients to place Purchase Orders through portal

1. Provide capability for clients to place their purchase orders through a portal
2. Allow them to select supplier, add SKU's (create if needed) , Qtys and (optionally prices) and delivery details
3. Function would communicate the PO to the supplier on behalf of customer, and crucially create the po record in TOT's internal system
4. By doing this, all client deliveries to TOT would be preceded by an electronic record including the contents - this reduces TOT's workload

Raise Purchase Orders for 3rd party items (miscellaneous items, tour returns) as requested by Customers

1. As production administration is a key communication point for clients - they are often tasked with creating records to service incoming client owned goods. This is done by creating purchase orders to allow goods in to process the goods once received.

Load in Order confirmations placed and ensure order placed is correct for qty and price

1. For a series of suppliers, TOT does not have API connectivity for order placing. In these instances, TOT staff place orders via the suppliers website.
2. Upon confirmation of the order by the supplier - Production Admin create the internal purchase order records to reflect the order placed via supplier website
3. A key part of this PO record creation is to validate the Items, QTY and Price of the PO record to ensure it matches the website placed order. Any discrepancies not discovered / remedied here result in downstream problems.

Processing Order Amendments

1. Customers requests for amendments to raised orders occur. The following table summarises the typical scenarios that Production Administration administer.
   

2. In processing customer amendments, production administration liaises with the various process departments involved in the order to establish the state of processing and whether the requested changes are feasible.
3. Depending on the state of process activities amendments or cancellation may not be possible
4. Decisions as to what can be amended as well as what charges for partially completed work should be levied are reliant on production administration knowledge and experience

Miscellaneous Inventory Administration

Supporting API Ordering

1. TOT has the capability to place orders with some suppliers via API
2. Orders placed via API require that the supplier identifiers for SKU's are supplied so that items ordered can be recognised
3. Production Administration manually record supplier identifiers against the corresponding TOT SKU records

Mistakes Recording

1. Respond to internal department notification of mistakes
2. Respond to customer complaints
3. Investigate to determine origin of mistake / complaint
4. Create & Populate Mistakes record recording origin. issue, potential loss etc.

Once created, mistake records are reviewed and escalated if applicable by production management

Workflow Schematic

See here for workflow schematic