Brother is one of the trusted partners of the Bangladesh RMG sector since the inception of this industry in Bangladesh. For Brother’s worldwide business strategy, the Bangladesh market is the most important for them.
Brother Bangladesh is actively supporting the garments industry from the starting of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh by arranging training for customers on machine maintenance, productivity analysis, power circuit board (PCB), etc. They have also given online technical training to their distributors because distributors give support to the customers directly.
From July 2020, Brother Bangladesh started a completely new and effective service for the factories namely ‘1-Line Assessment’ to assess productivity within a very short time.
“Being a trusted partner of this industry, we think that we also have some responsibilities at this crisis moment of the industry and business. And we always think that if the industry survives, the brother will survive. So, from the responsibility standpoint, we have come up with a completely new product in terms of industry capacity building which is helping tremendously in building industry capacity. And we have named the new product 1 Line Assessment,” said H N Ashiqur Rahman, Country Head, Brother Bangladesh.
Through this analysis, they analyze the productivity of a garment factory and submit a report to the management. Here, consultants from Brother give consultation where it is said which points need to be addressed to increase productivity.
“You’ll be glad to know that Brother is offering this highly expensive consultation for free to the Bangladesh garments industry. Brother has an expert team who is working on it and the interesting part is that it takes 3 to 4 hours for a factory to complete. What we do, on a fixed date we visit the factory and collect factory production data. And that day our expert team follows the full operating system i.e. entire production activity, machine maintenance, etc. of the factory and prepare a report analyzing these data,” Ashiqur Rahman added.
They summarize the total data and analyze these data to prepare a consultation report. Finally, they submit the report to the factory management. Mainly the team indicates in that report where there are bottlenecks in the production line and how to achieve maximum productivity by fixing small issues.
“I think if any factory can achieve 2% productivity based on the consultation report, this is the biggest achievement of this initiative,” says Ashiqur Rahman.
Read More: Brother initiates ‘1 Line Assessment’ project to build the post-COVID-19 apparel industry capacity
We started this 1 Line Assessment in July of this year and the truth is that we didn’t get any positive response in the beginning. There was a kind of skepticism among the garment factories as to whether we could do such an expensive consultation for free, or how effective it would be for the factory.
And right now our 1 Line Assessment consultation has received a tremendous response in the garments industry. We have already conducted 1 Line Assessment consultation in about 60 to 65 garment factories. And several factories have started their development work based on the report.
Now, factories are contacting us willingly, for example, our entire schedule is booked for the next 2 months, till November for this consultation service. We are sharing with great pleasure that Brother’s 1 Line Assessment is first introduced in Bangladesh and now this project is also started in different countries of the world and others are following Brother Bangladesh’s success model.
And finally, I will say, we have a legacy of more than 100 years. And Brother always being a trusted partner of Bangladesh garments industry with new products and services and will be in the future also. And you know, the motto of Brother is ‘we are always at your side’; Ashiqur Rahman concluded.
