The first two cutting facilities to receive the bar code scanners are at VFC's intimate apparel plants in Monroeville, Ga., and McAllen, Texas. Those pieces are packaged with the trim, then barcoded and scanned, and sent to a sewing plant for assembly. Today, everything's manual. Now, we receive it in, scan it and attach bar codes to it. After the sew plant, the items go to a distribution center, where they're scanned and tracked.
Symbol is the clothing-maker's vendor.
Company officials won't divulge how much the wireless upgrade will ultimately cost, nor which other vendors it considered during its RFP process, concluded last May. But they did acknowledge that their applications had to be adjusted so the scanners could feed into existing systems. That meant creating a complicated front-end between the scanners and the ERP apps, according to Richard Davis, VFC's IS project coordinator for RF scanning. SAP apps couldn't issue alerts if there were duplicate tracking numbers, for instance. The software fix prevents a lot of re-keying of flawed information.