In March and April 2014 two German consultants from ESGE Textilwerk Maag GmbH & Co. KG, a German manufacturer of clothes visited 16 garment factories in Myanmar. Thereby, the main objective was the assessment of the current production process to reveal issues that can be improved to eventually enhance the production process. The latest visits in April built on the previous initial visits, where first approaches for an improved working flow were made already. The two consultants checked the current status in the companies and gave further impulses.
Together with the responsible Myanmar trainees, more than 15 companies were visited at least once in the Yangon area to get an insight into their production of different kinds of clothes. By comparing ‘before’ and ‘after’ statuses various fields of improvements became obvious to the consultants. The elimination of such semi-optimal issues can produce a much better output, which is very often possible with little required effort by the companies’ management. As a consequence, because of the factory visits of the SMART Myanmar consultants and SCP trainees, a wide range of things could be improved in the production process of the respective companies. These include for example the introduction of in-house quality controls to detect errors in the production flow, which saves costs and makes the factories’ working flow more productive.
While the factory visits, also meetings with the companies’ managers were held to speak about different topics, such as the collection of data for a better planning. Very often comprehensive data about the production process is collected already. The international experts and Myanmar SCP trainees help with the collection of data and especially evaluation to improve the managements’ work. These are important steps in the SMART Myanmar project, which help to implement sustainable production in the garment industry in Myanmar.
As a result of the factory visits different forms and catalogues, such as a Production Improvement Catalogue for instance, were prepared and delivered to facilitate the SCP trainees’ future work. They can use for example the Factory Visit Protocol for well-structured factory visits in the next factory visits. Thereby, the efficiency of such walkthroughs can be increased. Furthermore, with the implementation of such concrete tools, the international consultants’ work will be more effective because they can refer to the mentioned well-structured guidelines.
