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Style Tracker Tips – How to build your Style Tracker to manage trims and materials
Sep 27 2021
4 minutes

Style Tracker Tips – How to build your Style Tracker to manage trims and materials

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Blog, Technology

Tracker Tips 101 

 How to build out your Style Tracker for trims and materials

Ever used project management or workflow tools like Asana, Monday.com or Clickup to build your critical paths but found it takes ages to get everything set up? Our newly launched Style tracker is a workflow management tool specifically built for the very unique production process in fashion, allowing both you and your factory to collaborate on it. We’ve built it so there are some guardrails to make it easy for you and your factory to hit the ground running—file organization, chatting with your factory and your team, building internal deadlines specific to each style & tech pack— but it’s also customisable to the unique targets of your process that need to be tracked.

You can build out our Style Tracker in many different ways! We have lots of ideas of ways you can customise milestones and columns in ways that work better for your business and your factory too.  

Style tracker
Track material status

Use Columns to…

Columns are a type of field that is fully customisable. You can add free form text, checkboxes, numbers, currency etc. You can create as many as you like, decide who can edit what, if you want to hide from,  or make read-only for,  your factory. For example, there may be an internal sign-off or approval, or internal comms you might not want to share with your factory.

Upload and share BOM or consumption — either live links or docs, add columns with check-boxes for approvals, add certain dates that are not part of your critical path or simply use to track comments throughout.

Track bulk approvals

 ???? Top 10 column title suggestions for materials and trims ????

  • Fabric Consumption (doc)
  • Trims Consumption (doc)
  • Trims Approval (check box)
  • Lab-dip Approval (check box)
  • Bulk Fabric Approval (check box)
  • Bulk Trim Approval (check box)
  • Strike Off Approval (check box)
  • Material Testing Required (check box)
  • Material Testing Report (doc) – factory to upload
  • Material Certification (doc) – factory to upload

And use milestones to make sure you don’t miss critical steps

Milestones are a unique type of field that is all about setting, agreeing on and tracking dates with your factory. You can use them as a way to track the current status of each colourway for each style. There are 4 default milestones that link to the main timeline, other than that – go crazy and add what you like.

You can create milestones to set target dates to share with your factory around when bulk material arrives in-house or star them to get overdue email notifications so you can keep on top of late approvals, overdue material QCs or late delivery of bulk. No longer forget key dates that make you miss your deadlines! Use Inspection milestones to build testing into your timelines and easily keep track of what passes/fails. 

Dates being starred or highlighted as overdue in SupplyCompass fashion project management tool

???? Top 10 titles suggestions for Milestones ????

  • Fabric quality approved
  • Lab dips approved
  • Strike-offs approved
  • Dyeing & Processing
  • Printing
  • Bulk Materials in house
  • Bulk Trim inhouse
  • Bulk Approval (inspection milestone)
  • Bulk Material / Testing (inspection milestone) 
  • Cutting started

 

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Flora Davidson
by Flora Davidson
Co-Founder at SupplyCompass
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As Co-Founder and Head of Product at SupplyCompass, Flora Davidson is responsible for the vision and direction of this platform. With a background in innovation and ethnographic market research, she’s wholly focussed on being customer-driven (brand and factory!) in her approach to what technology they build, how and why. She’s obsessed with good design and excellent, intuitive user experience. Flora is passionate about reimagining how the fashion ecosystem can work more openly and collaboratively together, and sees the shift in emphasis towards stronger partnerships between brand and factory, as foundational to the transformation of the industry.

 

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