Case Study: How Guess Cut Failed Inspection Rates with QIMAone

Case study

This year marks the fourth decade that Guess, Inc has been delivering the contemporary fashions and accessories that made it famous. With a net revenue in FY2020 of USD 2.68 billion, Guess is a recognized brand in over 100 countries.

Guess is proud to ensure that its products are sourced responsibly and manufactured in a way that isn't harmful to the environment. Since Guess doesn't own any factories and instead partners with manufacturing facilities and designers around the world who supply a finished product, it's important they stay connected to their supply chain to monitor production for the sustainability Guess has prioritized.

Guess is committed to operating with integrity and to empowering people. They source apparel from hundreds of suppliers in approximately 30 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Long-term supplier relationships help Guess control costs and get to market faster.

The challenges of modern supply chains

Managing a supply chain this widely distributed is hard even in the best of circumstances. When COVID-19 hit, it got harder — production and quality control suffered everywhere as regular travel to manufacturing facilities stopped.

The Guess team faced three challenges:

1. Timing — COVID-19 created longer lead times as production slowed and port congestion made transportation unpredictable.

2. A problem that predated COVID-19: vendors were booking on-site inspections too close to the delivery date, making it hard to schedule the right inspections with the right people — and leaving little time to catch and fix problems.

3. Data inconsistency — also a pre-existing issue the pandemic made worse. Inspectors struggled to file standardized reports and weren't always fully prepared to inspect the way Guess required. Small problems like damaged paper reports and inconsistent handwriting added up fast across a diverse, global supply chain.

The QIMAone Solution

QIMAone kept Guess's production running smoothly by digitizing the supply chain — enabling accurate inspection, reporting, and quality control. Before QIMAone, Guess used a digital inspection tool, but its capabilities were limited — it was really just for recording results.

With QIMAone, inspectors use established workflows and checklists to run inspections straight from a smartphone or tablet, sharing the report instantly on the same platform. That gives Guess a much wider view — checking product quality at distribution centers and comparing apples to apples against factory records.

Quality is an essential pillar of success for Guess, worth 25 of the 100 points in its vendor scoring system. Since Guess aims to evaluate vendors and factories on product integrity, QIMAone lets them monitor both supplier performance and inspector integrity during on-site quality control.

QIMAone analytics generate scorecards for suppliers and factories, making it easy to compare volumes, failure rates, common defects, and other key metrics at a glance. That helps Guess spot its best performers — a cornerstone of its continuous-improvement partnership strategy.

One of QIMAone's standout features is generating interactive reports, complete with defect photos, and sharing them with leadership in real time. With one click, managers can make decisions and take corrective actions. On one platform, the Guess QC team can deploy standardized quality assurance programs across the entire supply chain and make sharper sourcing decisions.

Without QIMAone, managing product quality and supplier compliance would be far harder under challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic or anything else that makes travel a struggle.

Cristina sees the Guess-QIMAone partnership growing stronger in the years ahead. "The apparel industry is a highly competitive industry, and ensuring quality is critical to our brand reputation. Any loss of consumer confidence towards our products could have a material adverse effect on our operations and financial condition. As an ongoing strategic initiative, we are looking forward to extending our quality control program to cover more facilities and having granular data from both on-site inspections and in-distribution center audits in one platform which will positively enable Guess to drive ongoing improvements in the supply chain," says Cristina.

Since adopting QIMAone, the Guess team has reworked its checklists with QIMA's experts to better match its quality standards — gaining efficiency and confidence by cutting the number of reports wrongly flagged as failed:

How QIMA can help

With our 20 years of experience conducting on-site audits and inspections, QIMA is ready to be your worldwide global Quality Excellence partner.

Our SaaS platform, QIMAone, is the first in its class, and includes all the features discussed in this article. We were the first QA service provider to establish an online reservation process, so we have digital in our DNA. QIMAone includes our QIMA Academy to provide your team with the best training possible.

QIMAone can also be used to check non-conformities and unauthorized subcontracting through GPS tagging that triggers inspections and audits.

We’d love to show you how QIMA and QIMAone can help your business thrive.

Want to see QIMAone in action?

Learn more by scheduling a demo today.