Textile Industry Rethinks Supply Chain Resilience

As global supply networks undergo transformation, the unpredictability of volatility, the implementation of new technology, and the need for sustainability prompt textile manufacturers to reevaluate their resilience strategies.

The global operational environment is being disrupted by volatility, lack of visibility, and increased compliance requirements, and these are pushing manufacturers of textiles to enhance supply chain management strategies. According to the experts in the industry, predictability in the supply networks is a significant challenge despite the presence of a lot of data.

According to the director of supply chain at Polo Custom Products, Jennifer Fennell, the raw material price fluctuations, tariffs, geopolitical risks, and port congestion have kept on pushing the textile manufacturing. Low visibility to Tier 1 suppliers leads to regulatory compliance and disruption prediction challenges, which are increasing costs and delivery timeliness. These forces are compelling manufacturers to rethink the manner in which the supply chain management structures and management are designed and managed.

Leonard Marano, who served as the former president of the Americas at Lectra, says that the supply chains of the future should be resilient but adaptable, traceable, and flexible, and the fallback plans should be embedded. Nevertheless, institutional learning and other action-based risk evaluations like stress testing are often undervalued by many manufacturers, who often presume that they are better prepared to handle future disruptions than to proactively evaluate them, a state of affairs that dilutes long-range supply chain resilience.

Digital tools become one of the most important facilitators. Supplier-risk dashboards, cloud-based inventory solutions, artificial-intelligence-based forecasting, and traceability solutions are some of the technologies assisting companies to promote the early warning of potential issues and react to them more rapidly. Besides efficiency, technology is also aiding sustainability objectives, the subject of which is becoming the core of a competitive supply chain management approach.

Analysts emphasize that in the wake of technology, constant employee training and teamwork between diverse functions are paramount towards having the ability to have supply chain systems that are resilient to future shocks.