According to the Hong Kong Trade Statistics, Hong Kong is a leader in the world of textiles and clothing. The industry accounts for one third of local output and employed over 324,000 people in about 30,000 industry-trading firms in 1997. However, the global market has become more competitive and with the relocation of many manufacturing establishments to other regions such as Maintain China, activities such as scouring, quality assurance and development of textile products are becoming more and more important. Due to the transformation of the Hong Kong textile industry from a manufacturing to servicing orientation, it requires more technical, information, knowledge-based specialists to serve local and off-shore operations. This point is reinforced in recent reports of Massachusetts Institute of Technology -MIT-1 and Kurt Salmon Association -KSA-2.on the techno-economic studies for aujio Kong textile and clothing industry. Both reports recommended establishing centers of excellence, to be a knowledge leader in the region and to accelerate the development of electronic commerce to improve the supply chain efficiency.
Despite so much technology and manpower have been applied to improve supply chain performance in term of EDI, flexible manufacturing, automated warehousing and rapid logistics, and new management concepts such as quick response, efficient consumer response, mass customization and learn manufacturing offer models for applying new technology to improve performance, limited success has been reported in the implementation of supply chain management. In this research, two supply chain strategies have been investigated in the manufacturing environment namely cycle view of supply chain process and push-pull view of supply chain process3 . Fisher4 argues success of supply chain management must match with demand characteristics of its product nature and suggests responsive supply chain strategy should be used for fashion, innovative products and efficiency
By: Jimmy K.C. Lam*, Ron Postle**, Philip K.W. Yeung*. * Institute of Textiles and Clothing, The Hong K
Submit Date: 6/14/2010 18:00