Brazilian footwear producers develop supply potential of bar coding
13 footwear companies based in the Brazilian state of Novo Hamburgo/RS have formed a working group aimed at exploring the full potential of bar coding and other electronic data interchange (EDI) technologies.
Set up with the support of the Brazilian Association of Footwear Industries (Abicalçados) and a team of specialists from the Brazilian Automation Association (a branch of EAN Brasil), the association has already begun using the technology for the transfer of information between factories in Grendene, Azalía and Beira Rio.
The group says it sees such technologies as being crucial to the continued competitiveness of the footwear sector, which is looking to improve on last year’s total revenues figure of US$1.5 billion by 15% to 20%.
One producer to have made extensive use of bar coding is Calcados Azaleia. Azaleia is one of Brazil’s largest shoe manufacturers with seventy industrial units operating in various Brazilian states. It consumes between seven and eight thousand metres of leather daily, employs twelve thousand people directly and another four thousand through contract work and produces 170,000 pairs a day.
According to Azaleia’s IT Manager, Tomas Alceu L. dos Santos, the principal benefit of bar coding is the higher degree of integration it brings to the raw material supply chain. Whereas previously, there was no consistency between different suppliers’ quality standards, now they are uniform across the board.
The efforts of suppliers are also much better integrated throughout the supply chain, dos Santos says, the end result being a much better product, manufactured at lower cost. "Now our suppliers feel better prepared to compete both in the domestic and foreign markets." dos Santos reports he is now planning to extend the use of bar coding to the supply of shoe components and accessories such as thread, elastic and decorations.
