A readymade garment manufacturing and sourcing company with its manufacturing facilities in Vietnam and liaison (sourcing) offices across the globe, Top Grade International Enterprise Limited established by German entrepreneur Thomas Hebestreit in 1995 is a US $ 600 million entity headquartered in Hong Kong supplying apparel items cutting across geographical locations.
“Bangladesh office mainly caters to Lidl, Takko Holding GmbH, Ernsting’s Family and Wappen Men’s Fashion GmbH apart from some Brazilian buyers like Cia Haring, Malwee and Kyly. We do all kinds of knit and woven items including sweaters for men’s, women’s and kid’s sections except lingerie and home textiles,” maintains W. R. Dissanayake, Country Manager Bangladesh, who took over the reins of Top Grade’s Bangladesh operations in 2005 only to take the country’s contribution in the company’s turnover from a meagre US $ 7 million to respectable turnover today.
This transformation did not happen overnight though; it took a lot of planning, scrutiny and implementation of effective strategies to attain the desired operational, manufacturing and business excellence on Dissanayake’s part. “When I joined the company it used to place orders to small buying offices and local agents,” underlined Dissanayake, who cheesed off by quality issues, delivery hold-ups and order cancellations took it on himself to build a pool of good associate factories where orders could be placed directly, reinforcing manpower of Top Grade’s liaison office in tandem to ensure improved operation and services to guarantee client satisfaction.
To make it to Top Grade’s list of supplier factories, which counts about 37 factories, one has to undergo rigorous selection process starting with compliance inspection. “A lot of suppliers approach us regularly, but we have to be very cautious whom we select,” Dissanayake states. Top Grade’s in-house compliance team is the first to visit a would-be associate factory to evaluate it on diverse parameters, including structural, fire and workplace safety. “All facets as per accord and BSCI standards and specifications are looked into and verified to maintain uniformity in compliance benchmark cutting across our client base,” reveals Dissanayake underlining that sending queries and price negotiations are the intervening steps before an order is placed. Top Grade’s other teams (Fabric Control, Washing Control, Quality Control, etc.) dedicated to look after different aspects of manufacturing soon takes over the role of following-up and suggesting requisite steps to associate factories on daily basis till consignments are ready for shipment.
“We look into each and every minute detail like fabric sourcing, purchasing procedures, samples guidelines, how many machines a factory is using on a particular day/order, daily output, washing and packing, etc,” Dissanayake elaborates. No matter how good a facility is, it takes till the third or fourth order for an associate factory to achieve the desired level of comfort, by when it gets accustomed and syncs with Top Grade’s working style, systems and processes, so feels the Country Manager of the company.
Next in line in Dissanayake’s scheme of things was a state-of-the-art in-house laboratory to help minimize the lead time. “I don’t think such a facility is available in any buying office in Bangladesh,” upholds Dissanayake, who depended exclusively on his Germany-based lab for all kinds of tests earlier. “When we send a sample for testing to Germany, it takes good 3-4 days to reach before it is actually scheduled for testing, which again takes another 2-3 days. By the time we get the report already 10-12 days are gone,” Dissanayake explicates, adding be there a negative test outcome, it’s a long, long haul taking close to 20 days at the least to repeat the whole cycle once again.
Dealing predominantly in basic items in larger volumes, the FOB range of Top Grade’s offerings varies depending on the product category. “Bangladesh has many backward-integrated garment manufacturing facilities, but they predominantly deal in big volumes. Handling small orders like 300-400 pieces per style is a daunting task… Such orders are routed to other liaison offices,” Dissanayake says. Top Grade also has its own Design and PD team to offer design and product development services including from basic design input up to developments of entire tailor-made collections, depending on the clients’ requirements.
“Cia Haring and Malwee always ask us to innovate something for them. They send us small fabric swatches. We make our developments on similar fabrics sourced locally or from China and send them back the samples to choose a style and confirm the order quantities. Lidl, however, sends its own designs, and follows a different working process,” says Dissanayake. Despite having a good run so far, the one thing that concerns Dissanayake is the existing socio-economic conditions in Brazil. “The economic situation in Brazil has gone down big time, aggravated more by the currency devaluation… We are not getting the orders we used to… There is also large-scale unemployment, which is my only worry, otherwise the business is good,” signs of the Sri Lankan, expressing hope that things are bound to change in Brazil [world’s ninth-largest economy by nominal GDP and seventh-largest by GDP (PPP) as of 2015], sooner than later.
