Case Study: How IKKS Digitized Quality Control with QIMAone

Case study

Founded in 1987, IKKS is a leading French apparel brand. Focusing on medium- and high-end apparel, IKKS is a global retailer, with distribution centers around the world, suppliers in China, India, and Vietnam, and 2,000 stores spread across 40 countries.

Though IKKS originally focused on children's apparel, it has since expanded to offer complete lines for women, men, and juniors. After initially selling its goods in supermarkets, IKKS has grown into a major force in ready-to-wear clothing without ever losing its dedication to high-end French style.

IKKS has built its reputation on chic French clothing and an easy, casual approach to high-end fashion. Always on the hunt for new trends, IKKS stays flexible enough to react to shifting consumer interests while still maintaining the quality customers expect from a major global retailer.

Increased Pressures on Global Supply Chains

IKKS shares its customers' desire for transparency in how a garment is made — they want to trace every product to protect quality and monitor working conditions and environmental impact across their production systems.

IKKS also wants a supply chain built for resilience and agility — one that can respond quickly to shifting fashion trends and disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic.

That's what led IKKS to look for a partner who could bridge the distance between suppliers and work around COVID-19 travel restrictions. IKKS wanted a smart online platform to empower local quality control inspectors across its factories, with reliable reports and more effective inspections.

The Challenges of Managing a Global Supply Chain

A July 2020 QIMA survey of 200+ brands and importers found that 87% expected significant changes to their supply management processes after COVID-19, and two-thirds pointed to faster digitization of their supply chain. IKKS wasn't going to be left behind.

IKKS needed better supplier communication and a standardized QC inspection process — one that worked across every supplier, held up through travel disruptions like a global health crisis, and gave close visibility into factory conditions and material origins.

IKKS also saw the value in coordinating and collaborating more closely with suppliers — which meant a system for processing and analyzing data across the whole company. All of this had to happen without moving inspectors between factories, in the middle of a once-in-a-generation health crisis, while customers were asking for more visibility into how their products were made.

Without a centralized software solution, IKKS couldn't meet all of these needs at once — and building one in-house would have pulled resources straight from the core business. So IKKS turned to a partner they already knew well: QIMA, and its new quality assurance software, QIMAone.

The Challenges of Managing a Global Supply Chain

As a long-standing QIMA quality control customer, IKKS knew exactly who to turn to for help managing and tracking its supply chain. The brand rolled out QIMAone at a handful of sites first, before scaling across its full operations.

QIMAone is built on experience from millions of quality and compliance inspections since 2005 — backed by a QIMA network of inspectors across 85 countries for whenever a challenge needs boots on the ground.

A Digital Solution to Supply Chain Management

QIMAone gives IKKS the tools for a transparent supply chain and strong quality control, including:

• Decision-support dashboards — real-time production quality monitoring, supplier and inspector performance, risk radar for potential defects

• Supply-chain mapping from factories to stores, start to finish

• An intuitive, guided inspection app with standardized checklists

• Automated inspection scheduling — including one-click booking of QIMA inspectors — plus protocol allocation and digital reports

• Configurable protocols — hundreds of QIMA inspection checklists for all consumer goods, customizable to brand specifications

With QIMAone, IKKS gets supply chain transparency without the extra legwork. Managers can monitor materials coming into, and goods shipping out of, factories and production partners from anywhere in the world — giving customers confidence that their purchases meet the environmental and ethical standards they expect.

Collaboration is Key

QIMAone keeps IKKS and QIMA working closely together, giving supply chain and quality control teams the tools to do their jobs. IKKS has found one of QIMAone's biggest strengths is how it breaks down collaboration across the company's silos.

QIMAone's software are powerful without being complicated, so managers across departments and levels can respond to supply disruptions and build accurate QC reports with confidence. Standardized analytics reporting makes those reports easy to share — so everyone's on the same page, speaking the same language.

QIMA's deep understanding of IKKS's business meant QIMAone could be tailored to exactly what IKKS needed. And as trends and customer demands shift, QIMAone lets IKKS shift its resources just as fast.

How QIMA can help

With our 16 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.

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