Twelve yarns: what a knitwear mill taught us about lead times

When we arrived at Corran Knitwear in Hawick, an order took eleven weeks to leave the building. The knitting machines had plenty of capacity. Every order was waiting for its yarn, and the yarn was bought order by order.

Corran knits 180 styles in 40 colours, so the buying team had a reason to work that way. Holding all 40 colours in stock would have tied up more cash than the business could spare. Buying to order kept the cash safe and made every customer wait.

Count before you plan

We spent the first week counting. Three years of orders, line by line, sorted by yarn. Twelve of the forty colours covered seven orders in ten. The other twenty-eight were spread across the rest, some of them used once or twice a year.

Keeping those twelve in stock all year cost less than losing a single stockist, and Corran had lost two the year before. That number did most of the persuading.

If the plan only lives in a spreadsheet, the floor runs on a different one.

Plan around the few

The new plan treats the twelve yarns as stock and everything else as made to order, with an honest lead time for each. Customers ordering in a stock colour get a date in weeks. Customers ordering in a rare one know from the start that it takes longer.

We also walked the floor with a measuring wheel. Two machines moved next to finishing, which saved every bundle an 80-metre walk. The weekly plan went on a whiteboard in the middle of the floor, where the people running the machines could see it and change it.

Corran had tried two software systems before we arrived. Both held a plan that nobody on the floor looked at.

Order to dispatch fell from eleven weeks to five within the year, and both stockists who had left came back for the autumn season.