Don’t Be Afraid To Change Things Up

When times get challenging on the business front, it’s a good time to take a long hard look under the hood. We at Jaftex have been doing a lot of looking under the hood of late with economic conditions worsening and the insanity of Covid excesses waning. With that, we have decided to make one fairly large change. I am sure there will be others, but for now, this is the big one and at least the one I am going to share with you today. Let me tell you about it.

One area where we need to control our costs better is with our double and rolling. As such, after some careful reviewing, we decided that we would move all of our double and rolling overseas instead of handling it at our domestic warehouses.

As is the case already, most everything that we bring in from Pakistan comes in double and rolled. That includes our 108″ & 118″ lines, flannel lines and other lines like our white-on-white or 1930s-styled lines.

In South Korea, we really haven’t been doing much double and rolling of late. However, at one point in the past, we were doing a fair amount of double and rolling overseas. I guess we kind of go back and forth on this issue as the circumstances change. As it goes, this time around we are going the other way and moving things back to South Korea.

The truth is that the economics of the whole thing out of the US was no longer making sense as it related to double and rolling the fabric. On the pulling and packing order side of the warehouse business, the economics are still working. Without going into too many details though, just take my word for it that the cost/benefit analysis was pointing towards moving everything away from our domestic cutting.

With that, starting in about the second half of this year, most all of our goods will be arriving in the US cut. After we have some time under our belts testing this out, we will take a look under the hood again to see if the analysis was correct and if we made the right decision. If so, great! If not, we might bring things back to the US and go back to the drawing board. You don’t know until you try!

There are some immediate positives and negatives that come to my mind regarding this decision. Here are a few.

On the positive side:

• The cost is less from overseas.
• Fewer short bolts as the cutting overseas should be more efficient. That makes for less waste and we won’t have to spend time trying to sell off those odd-sized bolts.
• When the goods arrive in the US, they will be put right on the shelves and will be ready to ship out to customers immediately. In other words, it should save us time.
• The goods will not have to be in a cue to wait to be cut which can create delays in meeting a proper delivery.

On the negative side:

• We will lose our flexibility. For example, if everything comes in cut, we won’t be able to get rot (rolled on tube) to make precuts. We will have to use the double and rolled goods which aren’t as efficient to use when making precuts.
• Our team will have a shorter window to take case pack orders. In other words, if customers want to buy an entire line that we offer, we do allow them to order in smaller case pack sizes i.e. 12-yard cuts instead of 15. That is an incentive for them. Since goods will be cut sooner in the timeline, the window to sell case packs will be shorter. Not the end of the world, but a negative nonetheless. Hopefully, we can retrain customers to get in sync with our timing. This shouldn’t take long.
• We will lose control which could be a little frightening if the mills get out of sync with our timeline and run late. Or, what if something else causes the goods to come in late like delays on the boat or difficulty getting the goods off the boat and trucked to our facility?

That’s the news for this week. I am sure glad I didn’t have to write another “Setting The Record Straight” blog. Have a great week.