The American inventor and founding father Benjamin Franklin once said, "Time is money". This is an adage that many businesspeople have taken to heart, and it makes sense that if you save time, you also save money.

This is the underlying principle behind the move towards electronic commerce and more extensive computerisation at TAL Apparel Ltd (abbreviated as TAP), a Hong Kong clothing manufacturing company. Dr Harry Lee, Managing Director of TAP, notes, "The most important thing about computerisation is how it affects the total cost of doing business. How fast can we communicate with each other? And how can we, as a supplier, reduce our customers' inventory? This is our starting point when we decide what kind of available tools we can use to do these things."

Connecting the Dots
Of course, having computers is not the only thing that saves a business money. Many businesses, including TAP, have had some form of computerisation for up to two decades. What is different now is the advent of the Internet. "Obviously, the Internet is a very convenient tool. Today, with all the connectivity - to banks, to customers, to everyone else - data does not have to be re-entered over and over again, and you can process it and pass information back to the bank or back to the customer very quickly so that they can use it. And that helps improve productivity and save costs, both on our side and for our customers," says Lee.

Part and parcel of the Internet revolution is electronic commerce and TAP makes excellent use of this advantage to speed up its delivery times and, therefore, keep its customers happy.

Any business involved in sending shipments of goods to other countries understands the huge amount of documentation needed. The companies who have harnessed the electronic processing of this documentation (and, of course, Tradelink is one such company) have played an enormously important role in the success of many of these businesses.

Says Lee, "We need to prepare a lot of documents - shipping documents and packing lists and so on - so simply passing that information to Tradelink is another area where we can get help with data processing. Previously, we had to print the data out, hand it to the government, get it approved, get it stamped, which all took time, which cost money." Now, of course, Tradelink handles all of these processes for TAP, a service much appreciated by Lee, who also has full confidence in the security of the Tradelink software.

As Lee acknowledges, e-commerce has come so far that there is definitely no turning back. He even questions whether, in the future, the post office may become obsolete, particularly once a worldwide adoption for electronic signatures (something that Tradelink is pioneering for its Pan-Asian E-Commerce Alliance) is in place.

Service with a Smile
"E-commerce is a tool that helps us conduct our business and provide services for our customers. I keep telling our people that we are not a manufacturing company any more; we have become a service company. It just so happens that our business is apparel. We have to think of services that our customers might want in the future rather than what they want today," says Lee.

And it is in pursuit of this service ethic that TAP is making use of the Internet and increased automation to make its customers' lives easier. As Lee explains, in the apparel business, customers tend to buy their stock twice a year (sometimes more often) for the two major seasonal lines. Previously, the ordering process meant that it could take up to six months for the goods to be manufactured and actually arrive in the store. TAP is cutting that lead time down to a matter of weeks by managing its customers' inventory for them.

"Our idea was that, for some of the basic clothing items, there was no reason for the process to take so long. Today, a customer does not even need to give us an order. We physically manage their inventory by store, by colour and by size. We send them a reverse purchase order, telling them what we are shipping to them. All they have to do is give us their Point of Sales data - which is done simply by scanning the bar code of an item when a sale is made - each week so that we know what they have sold and what they have left in the inventory. From that information, we do our calculations to forecast what they need and we send the shipments according to that information. The whole process is automatic, so there's not even a need for checking," says Lee.

Adaptability Still Important
In the actual manufacturing process for TAP's goods, there is less computerisation, although the sewing machines are themselves tracking stations that allow the company to keep track of at which stage each bundle of goods is, as well as automatically calculate the number of items a piece worker has handled.

There is a good reason for the lower rate of automation in the manufacturing process, as Lee points out: "In our business, there are only certain areas that you can automate. We are doing more and more computerised cutting, which is an area we can automate quite easily. But in the sewing process there's very little automation because, once you do that, it becomes very difficult to change a style. People come to us because of our adaptability to fashion and colour changes. If we keep on automating, there will clearly be a loss of value. We have to stay very flexible."

Going to the Source
TAP is also using the Internet to source and order raw materials from selected suppliers, automating the process so that the company simply places an order in a specific mailbox on its web site and the supplier collects the order online, acknowledging its receipt and eventual fulfillment electronically. "We have had this system in place with five major companies on a trial basis, which has proved successful. Next month, will be rolling it out to about 200 suppliers," says Lee. Mindful of the need to provide training on how to use this system, TAP sends members of its staff to suppliers to explain and demonstrate the system.

But it is, of course, in the area of electronic data transfer that the Internet is having the greatest impact on business. Although not everyone in the business world is wired, more and more companies are joining the community. "I can only see it getting better," predicts Lee, who also lauds the increase in number and popularity of industry portals that are taking over much of the data mapping process, thus lifting another burden from the shoulders of individual companies.

"We encourage our partners to use e-commerce," adds Lee. "Eventually, all our invoices and delivery notes, etc will be electronic so we will reduce the handling time substantially. It's the way of the future," he concludes.