Comino Connect Case Study:
A garment packaging group

Founded in 1961, the group was a privately owned company until the late 1990s when it became part of the Australian-owned group of companies.

The group created a name for itself within the business of plastic coat hangers for the UK retail trade sector. Year on year growth has allowed for the subsequent diversification into the related fields of garment packaging and labelling for their clients, the UK’s major High Street retailers.

Working closely with the retail store’s presentation design brief, the group manages the entire process through to production in fourteen counties across the globe. Originally responsible for IT within the Group and now a director of the group, he has been the energy and enthusiasm spearheading the current round of changes the group has undergone in order to retain their market position.

The essence of the group is that it uses partner-based relationships to manage the supply chain throughout the world. Its suppliers, the production facilities who physically make the packaging solutions, (typically injection moulders, printing shops, etc), are geographically located alongside the garment manufacturers.

A key issue to the group is to remain extremely flexible towards the needs, ebbs and flows of the market, and its customers, the garment manufacturers, who move around globally chasing the competitive labour markets. There is currently a lot of activity in South East Asia, with a particular focus in Bangladesh.

The Problem However, competition in the UK & the USA is fierce and the group needed a way to gain a competitive edge. The group, being a Global organisation, needed to make the right information available to all parts of its demand and supply chain at the right time – automating the data flow – using the Internet for their business transactions.

The drawback was that, as he says, “Although global in operation, we are no a global carmaker, and the type of IT spend being demanded by some companies for a global communications network is simply uneconomic.” The situation became more critical at the time the group diversified into the garment ticketing arena, a venture which substantially increased the number of variables that could go wrong at any point in the supply process.

The smallest typing error could result in a shipment of half a million garments being delayed, or even worse rejected by the distribution centre, with all the financial penalties that would ensue. The Solution Together with their development software house the group developed and refined their own bespoke eBusiness system: A system accessible to their clients, customers, suppliers and all internal the group staff. Initially the system was hosted by their software house, however the situation soon became a cause of frustration as the site required 24/7 availability as its users were positioned across all the world’s time zones.

At this point the group started the hunt for a business Internet Service Provider to look after the housekeeping, enabling the software house to continue to act on the on-going software development of the site. The director was looking for “A professionally managed environment and service at a reasonable price.” As the group had “Champagne taste but beer money”, the director needed to find an economically viable first-class solution. He needed a fully managed, resilient and secure Internet connectivity solution, which additionally would need to host their eBusiness site.

He spoke with some major players in the market place who, on the whole, were too expensive. The director considered six quotations and, although Comino Connect were not the cheapest, he believed he would achieve his desired objectives with this smaller, friendlier, very professional and certainly approachable organisation. This was very appealing as good relationships are key to the group as a business but also to the director personally.

Comino Connect was more than able to supply the group with the infrastructure and service capable of hosting the mission critical site, with a more realistic pricing structure. He was sold. The international system is set up so that each region has its own database and set of parameters. Importantly the website has to be capable of timing and dating all transactions correctly, regardless of which time zone the instruction emanated from. As testament to its success, the new system is so easy to access and so highly available that the group staff at their HQ now prefer to use this rather than the previous back office order processing and accounting system.

And of course it?s reliable. Winning several national and international Web awards has been complimentary, but worthless if the site access and service couldn’t be relied upon. The group solution utilises best of breed hardware and software throughout.

The e-business system is hosted on enterprise servers, whilst a diversely routed Internet solution provides the group corporate network with secure browsing and email services. This complex Internet connectivity solution is provisioned over dual enterprise-class routing and Firewall equipment, with fibre connectivity providing LAN access to the e-business system.

All elements of the Comino Connect solution are designed to meet the fully managed service expectation, and are covered by high availability Service Level Agreements. The Future Over the next couple of years, the group has the aim of developing much closer data links with their clients, the high street retailers. The company would also like to complete the full global roll out of the eBusiness system.

Although eBusiness handles all the group products, initially the need had to be prioritised towards countries supplying garment ticketing and labelling. They would also like to do more business in the USA. The director would like to see further development toward fully automating the supply side, where packaging designs will be sent direct to print.

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