Shoppers won’t see this behind-the-scenes fix, but manufacturers and brands are paying attention. Suzhou Tianyuan Garments has digitised production with Coats Digital’s GSDCost, boosting SMV accuracy to 98% and slicing days off new-product analysis , a step that matters for speed, margins and sustainability.
Essential Takeaways
- SMV accuracy: Improved to 98%, giving consistent, predictable labour times.
- Faster analysis:...
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New product process breakdown cut from 3–4 days to 1 day, speeding quotation and planning.
Shorter sampling: Sample garment development cycles reduced by 25%, helping win fast-turn business.
Cost and delivery gains: Cost estimates now ~95% accurate and on-time delivery raised to 96%.
Waste and efficiency: Material waste fell about 2%, while process analysis efficiency rose 60%.
Opening Hook: Why a decimal point matters on the factory floor
A few percentage points can make or break a bid for a major sportswear order, and Tianyuan’s move to GSDCost turned fuzzy, experience-based timing into repeatable, data-led decisions. The change isn’t glamorous , it’s the kind of quiet engineering that makes large production runs feel smooth, predictable and less stressful for line managers.
Backstory and how the change came about
Tianyuan, a Suzhou-based maker of sports and technical outerwear with more than 5,000 staff and 26 million garments a year, relied on engineers’ judgement for standard minute values (SMVs). That led to discrepancies up to 30% across lines and slow new-product analysis. Facing shrinking margins and faster, fragmented orders from brands, the company began a three-year digital transformation and adopted GSDCost to standardise methods and times.
What GSDCost actually did for Tianyuan
The platform brought a unified operation library and a standardised process database covering tens of thousands of operations, so teams now get consistent SMVs and fast process matches , even for complex functional garments. Quotation efficiency jumped by over 60% because process breakdowns that once took days now take hours or a single day, and cost-estimation accuracy moved from roughly 75% to 95%.
Trends and comparisons across the industry
This isn’t an isolated win. Other manufacturers using GSDCost have reported productivity uplifts and lower SMV variation, suggesting a wider industry shift from rule-of-thumb engineering to predetermined-time systems. For brands chasing speed and transparency, shared benchmarks and standard motion codes make negotiations fairer and supply chains more resilient.
Practical insight: choosing tech that actually reduces risk
If you run or work with a factory, look for systems that do three things: create a single source of truth for operations, let you reuse validated process libraries, and offer fast scenario costing. That matters most when orders are fragmented or when you’re quoting technical outerwear with many specialised steps. Also check that implementation includes training and a clean migration of legacy calculations; Tianyuan credited close integration with Coats Digital for building a 50,000-process database.
Reaction and what comes next
Management at Tianyuan sees GSDCost as the engine turning conventional manufacturing into “smart manufacturing.” The immediate wins were improved negotiation power with premium clients and a real-time production management system. Longer term, more consistent SMVs and better waste metrics can support sustainability claims as well as margins , a tidy double benefit.
Closing line
It’s a small change behind the scenes that can make every bid stronger and every delivery steadier. Explore the timing and costing tools that suit your operation before the next season’s rush.
