NOW: The digital platform for the companies of the future

This essay was written by the Datasys Project Manager Maurizio Fattori, who will explain the main benefits of NOW digital platform.

Challenges for textile companies became more and more complex in the last few years. Global markets demand effective responses to the request of numerous new items, with quantities often below the traditional standard, and faster delivery times. It is compulsory to minimize and control carefully the sales prices and follow regulations that are becoming more analytical and pervasive from year to year.

All the drivers of supply have to be weighted up and monitored at the highest levels, because the variables to consider are increasingly heterogeneous and are not only related to the appearance of the items or their effectiveness. In fact, they also concern the technological content and the service level that a company can assure. The packaging, once underestimated, assumes today a great strategic importance, given the widening of regulations related to it and the necessity to differentiate it according to the target market.

All these aspects forced companies to reduce the traditional logic of the serial production and to reconsider their own organization in order to make it suitable for customized means of production, with a different offer according to the target market or the customer.

This change has often been addressed by relying on previous generations of businessmen, that in the last decades could make their own companies grow, keeping their health status and their coherence steady with respect to the global economic and technologic evolutions.

However nowadays, the world has radically changed and unluckily the present conditions do not allow to stay competitive only relying on the human factor or on company’s internal resources, no matter how relevant. Technology is making huge progresses from all  points of view: engineers plan and deploy new plants able to improve the outcomes in terms of flexibility, effectiveness and economic return. Furthermore, the sourcing of materials and particular more complex components, requires an expansion of the suppliers’ base, regardless of their geographic location. In fact, today the target market is not a single country or a continent, but companies address to the whole world, facing the challenges  related to distances and cultural diversities.

The competition is no longer represented by the businessman in the next factory, but it can be everywhere in the world. In order to be successful companies  have to stay competitive in terms of costs and delivery times, despite the distances. To do this, however, it is no longer enough to develop gradually: a disruptive way, new organizational and technological processes have to be introduced, thus adjusting 360 degrees or companies’ structure to the new market’s functioning logic.

Yet, it is clear that a deep change process cannot take place if the company does not own a digital platform able to provide support during this difficult transition. We are talking about “digital platform”, because just talking about ERP is not sufficient compared to companies’ real needs.  Indeed, they have to manage a huge amount of data in different formats (taking care of their storage and sharing them among company’s users) and they have to be structured to make the retrieval and the supply of information to external sources as easy as possible.

Datatex offers to companies who need to face these challenges the solution in the form of the NOW digital platform. It includes natively, all the functions that make one company unique in its way of working, from the management of sales agents’ commissions, supply chain and external commission suppliers to administrative and financial functions, such as treasury, assets and management control.

NOW is installed in 46 countries, 10 languages, is used by 20.000 users and it is supports structures of multi-company, multi-language, multi-division and multi-factory. Datatex solution assures a complete application coverage from sales to purchasing through planning ,finite capacity scheduling, collection of data on-board the machine , quality assurance, integrated with the CRM for a better lead management and with B.I. tools for the analysis of business trends.

NOW is flexible and is built up of modules, complete and effective, which can adapt to every aspect of the business process.  The customer can easily customize the platform according to its own organizational model, considering which module to install and – through the use of templates – adapting and personalizing them to the company’s needs, without writing customization programs. Maintaining and assuring 100% full version compatibility

NOW offers B2B functions suitable to the whole supply chain and the easy integration with the company’s partners allows to enhance the business opportunities, increase the speed of goods flow and improve the production flexibility.

Information is managed in the most effective and easy to read format, using graphs, Gantt or attached documentation, in order to allow all users to access the necessary information to perform their activities.

Furthermore, NOW provides a series of tools that, through different levels of aggregation, enable the  analysis of  this information, thus easing the task of who has to decide for the best business strategies.

The technology adopted to implement NOW, the standard Java EE JEE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition), not only allows the technological independence of the hardware platform and the compatibility with all the most common database, but it also assures the flexible and simple integration with other software required by all digital platforms. In order to access the platform from all over the word, all that is needed is an internet connection and a browser device (tablet, PDA,…).

The screens are automatically displayed in the browser’s language defined by each user, who has personal log-in credentials that allows and authorizes access only to the areas of concern. This also applies to the main partners (Customers / Suppliers), who can get access to single parts of the supply chain.

Each attempt to access to other system’s areas is limited by the security up to the single field level, if so desired. Moreover, NOW offers to its customers protection from cyber-attacks such as Cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection (SQLi), local file inclusion (LFI) o distributed denial of service (DDoS).  These features make NOW suitable to be installed either on a company owned server or on CLOUD solutions.

The coverage of production and administrative processes based on the typical needs of textile and apparel companies, the advanced technology with which NOW has been implemented, the direct presence of our offices or resellers in all industrialized countries, in order to assure an efficient and quick support on site and the cost-effective maintenance and project expenses, make NOW an unique product on the digital platforms scenery and the real alternative to traditional solutions.