How Apparel & Footwear Compare to Electronics & Automotive Industry in the Race for Automation.

Survey Result

    Digital transformation enables companies to improve their efficiency and get closer to customers (Tabrizi et al., 2019), and this requires companies to adapt to strategies, organization, information technology, supply chain and sales (Verhoef et al., 2021). However, there is always possibility of failures in this process, and taken from several sources that the success rate of digital transformation varies from 25% – 67% (TEC, 2022) (Jordan, 2018), (Ultra Consultant, 2019), (Atieh et al., 2016).

      Digital transformation is not only about using as many technologies as we can, but more on the clear vision of company’s development (Schwertner, 2017), and then supported by existing technology. And for that, companies must open themselves to the strategic process (Matzler et al., 2018) and adopt the changes. The end goal is to facilitate smoother interaction with customers (Schwertner, 2017).

We did a survey to a group of people from various companies and roles (Sales, QC, IE, Production, Finance, Logistic) within apparel and footwear industry and result is as follow:

• Device on daily work: 51.11% use laptop, 22.22% use mobile phone and 26.67% use both laptop and mobile phone
• Software for work: 75% use Microsoft office, 16.67% use ERP and the rest use other type of software
• 88.89% use system/software provided by company
• 73.33% use excel minimum 4 hours per day
• 77.27% open other software minimum 4 hours per day
• 50.00% understand the meaning of Digital Transformation
• More than 50% agree that Digital Transformation can bring benefits, make life easier and in order to achieve that they may need to change the way they work
• 4.44% expect for cost savings, 13.33% expect for improvement, 6.67% expect for time savings, and 75.56% expect for all benefits.

It is interesting to see the above answers, and we can conclude that most people are using various systems, prepared to adopt to new technology and understand the benefits that Digital Transformation can bring.

The next step is to see if the companies in apparel and footwear industry are willing to make that happen, or remains as the wishful thinking.