Clothing Production Management Software

Production management software is the system that runs the making of clothing as an organized flow of information: customer orders in, production orders out to the factory floor or an outside contractor, raw materials consumed, finished garments booked in, deliveries made and invoices raised — with the status of every order visible while there is still time to act on it.

For a manufacturer or wholesaler, that visibility is the product. The questions that decide profit — what will this style actually cost to make, which orders are late and why, how much fabric a production run truly needs — are answered by the production record, or they are answered by guesswork at the end of the season.

From Sales Order to Production Order

The workflow begins with the customer order. The system confirms it, splits it into production orders, and breaks each production order down by customer, product, fabric, color and size — the analysis that tells the factory what to make and the warehouse what to pick. Split and partial deliveries are managed as normal events, not exceptions, and each delivery generates its notes, labels and paperwork: order confirmations, pro-formas, delivery notes and invoices, including fully customs-compliant invoices for export orders.

Raw materials run alongside. The system stores fabrics, trims and garment processes with their costs, calculates total requirements for a production run, and raises purchase orders to suppliers — in multiple currencies where the buying is international. Production itself is booked out and booked back in: materials issued to a manufacturer, finished production received, with the status of every production order listed at any moment.

Costing and the Production Book

Product costing is where production software earns its keep. A finished garment's cost is built by selecting raw materials and processes and letting the system total them — accurately and the same way every time — for domestic and imported product and for CMT (cut, make, trim) arrangements alike. Line drawings or digital photos attach to the costing, line sheets generate with sketches and prices, and reports show total make costs and total gross profit by product, customer or country.

Stock positions close the loop: raw material inventory status and finished product inventory status, pick and pack lists that simplify allocation of finished garments, and production labels and swing tags printed from the same record. Financial reports by customer or country turn the production book into the numbers the business is actually run on.

Production Software Suppliers in This Directory

F2IT Limited offers an online order-placement and production system for wholesale and manufacture, designed to be practical and painless: it handles raw materials, sizing and colors in a sensible way, coordinates activities from sales and production to invoicing, cross-references information to spot mistakes, and produces clear order forms and invoices with technical backup and secure data backup (customers still own their own data). Its feature set, summarized in the sections above, spans supplier and customer data, order management, production analysis, product costing, raw material control and book-out/book-in production tracking. F2IT's website no longer responds, so the entry is kept unlinked as a record of the system.

Magnal Solutions, based in Montreal, Canada, develops and markets the FACTS and SDM software lines; FACTS is its production management system for the apparel industry, from a developer focused on fashion manufacturing. Its site is linked in the references below. Companies evaluating production software should map a full order's journey — order, costing, materials, factory, delivery, invoice — against each system, because the gaps between modules are where manual work hides.