How have you had to change to keep pace with changes in the industry?
Tom Mann: Erickson Outdoors initially was launched as a company whose roots were in the outdoor business and our initial credibility and customer contacts were in that field. Today, we’ve branched out into a lot of other markets. They’re still almost all sports-related, but such things as women’s active wear, and golf, and cycling. It reaches well outside of our outdoor industry roots.
Mark Erickson: We’ve adapted in terms of the tools and equipment that we use to get our job done. In the old days, we made patterns on grocery bag paper with a pencil and a ruler, a very manual process. Now of course that’s all done on computers. We can make patterns much more quickly, much more accurately than we ever could in the past. So as the industry has matured so has Erickson Outdoors.
Tom Mann: I guess one major change is that we’ve had to get a lot better at business; not just better tools and equipment, but more business sophistication. Things like data management, accounting, inventory control…
Mark Erickson: True. That and process improvement. We’ve evolved a formal nine-step development process that insures that everyone is rowing in the same direction on every project.
How is technology changing your business?
Mark Erickson: Mostly in the area of information management. We’ve got a pretty sophisticated MRP system — that’s “materials requirement planning” — and we’ve developed our own PDM software — that’s “Product Data Management” — for use in our design room.
Tom Mann: Our customers are requiring more and more sophisticated access to data about their order status and shipment information. We now provide advanced shipping notices — ASN’s — to all of our customers. It’s essentially a detailed packing list that is delivered electronically the moment the product ships and is distributed to all the levels of the company. Accounting can use it to match up with invoices, receiving will know what to expect, merchandise managers can calculate their future purchasing requirements. And everyone receives this information simultaneously rather than it trickling down from the warehouse once it’s received.
Is the entire industry technologically savvy?
Mark Erickson: It’s a really interesting mix: some elements — like information management — are quite advanced; others — like sewing itself — are still sort of crude. The sewing function is basically handicraft. Garments get put together one stitch at a time, by a human being sitting behind a machine that hasn’t fundamentally changed since it was invented in the 18th century.
Tom Mann: Then you run into different levels of technical sophistication at different factories, and in different countries. You may communicate with one factory via e-mail and electronic spreadsheets; at another you’ve got to go on the floor yourself and do your own counts. One is not necessarily better than the other; just different…
Mark Erickson: That can get kind of frustrating though, if you’re a merchandise manager for a brand, trying to coordinate product from all these different factories into one coherent whole, on one uniform delivery schedule.
Tom Mann: That’s why customers will often say to us: “You deal with all those variables, and give it to me in one tidy consistent package.” Which we do…
Mark Erickson: When we evaluate a manufacturer we’re obviously concerned about what systems they have in place: how they manage their workflow; how they train their employees, how they manage their data and their records. But we also look at the quality of their needlework. How do their garments look?
Tom Mann: And their credibility: are they able to predict with consistency when they’re going to start, when they’re going to finish a job? We find these things are just as important — maybe more important — than how many fancy computers they’ve got in the front office.
