Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, Second edition - Pr School

60 Fashion Marketing
manner, and by responding effectively to constantly changing and highly
competitive business environments. The agile supply chain is applicable to
situations where minimal lead times are required to address volatile consumer
demand with high levels of availability (Hiebelar et al., 1998). The agile supply
chain has a number of distinguishing features. It is market-sensitive with
the ability to respond to actual real-time changes in demand. Organizations
must acquire capacity capability in order to be able to react to possible volatile
fluctuations in demand. The use of information technology to share data
between buyers and suppliers is crucial for agile supply (Harrison et al., 1999)
as it will improve visibility of requirements and reduces the amount of stock
(Hewitt, 1999). Information sharing between supply chain partners is important
to support activities such as joint product development. Childerhouse and
Towill (2000) argue that the adoption of the lean principles are appropriate for
commodity products where demand can be predicted and agile principles are
relevant for innovative products such as fashion garments where demand is
unpredictable and product life cycles are short.
Leagile supply
The concept of ‘leagile’ supply chains has been suggested (e.g. Van Hoek,
2000; Mason-Jones et al., 2000; Naylor et al., 1999). ‘Leagile’ takes the view that
a combination of lean and agile approaches should be combined at a decoupling
point for optimal supply chain management. Mason-Jones et al. (2000)
argue that agility will be used downstream and leanness upstream from the
decoupling point in the supply chain. Thus, leagile enables cost effectiveness
of the upstream chain and high service levels in a volatile marketplace in the
downstream chain. However, Van Hoek (2000) argues that although a leagile
approach to supply chain management may work in an operational sense, it
makes no sense to fundamentally challenge the concept of agility, as it has to
fit with an agile approach to supply chain management in order to be applied
properly.
Textiles and fashion is characterized by volatile markets, short product
lifecycles and high product variety (Fernie, 1999). The sector has low-profit
margins and thus holding small quantities of stock is often not a viable
option. Often, fashion companies combine agile and lean supply chain management
methods to respond to changing markets in order to provide quick
replenishment.
Managing a portfolio of supplier relationships
The fashion buyer plays a key role in developing and managing relationships
between the company and its suppliers. A company will have a variety of
types of relationships with different suppliers ranging from close partnerships
with key suppliers to develop products and to generate the best outcome