In a growing apparel business, being busy can easily be mistaken for being productive. Orders increase, product ranges expand, more customers come on board and new sales channels are introduced. Almost inevitably, more work follows.

Customer service teams check stock availability and order status, purchasing teams chase information, warehouse teams respond to queries and managers pull together reports. People move information between systems, update spreadsheets and answer questions that are asked time and time again. Individually, many of these tasks take only a few minutes, but collectively they can consume a significant amount of time.

So perhaps the question shouldn’t simply be how we can help people work faster. A better question is which of these tasks should require their time at all.

Not every task needs a person

There will always be situations in an apparel business that require experience, judgement and a human response. A key customer might suddenly need an order brought forward, a best-selling line could run ahead of forecast, a supplier delay might threaten availability or an unusual product requirement may need resolving. These are exceptions that cannot always be predicted and rarely have a standard response, and this is precisely where people add value.

Routine activity is different. Checking whether an order has been despatched, looking up previous purchases, confirming stock availability or producing the same management information every week are all necessary activities, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they need to be manually managed every time they occur.

This distinction between the routine and the exception becomes increasingly important as apparel businesses grow. When both are treated in the same way, talented people can spend a disproportionate amount of their working day administering the predictable rather than managing the important.

Follow the questions your teams answer every day

A useful place to start is not with technology, but with the questions being asked repeatedly across the business. Customers may want to know where their order is or whether a particular size is in stock. Teams might need to find out when a product will become available, what a customer ordered previously, whether a purchase order has arrived or what remains on back order.

If employees have to stop what they’re doing, find the relevant information and respond every time one of these questions arises, the cost of each interaction may appear small. Multiply that activity across hundreds of orders, customers, products and working days, however, and the picture changes considerably.

More importantly, this routine activity can interrupt the work that genuinely needs people’s attention. This isn’t an argument for removing people from customer service or operations. Quite the opposite. It’s about ensuring they have more time to provide the service, expertise and judgement that customers and the wider business really value.

Make managing by exception the goal

The principle is relatively simple: let routine processes flow and direct people’s attention towards the points where something needs intervention. If an order is progressing exactly as expected, there may be very little for somebody to do. If that order is at risk of being late, contains a stock shortfall or requires an alternative course of action, that is when someone needs to know.

Rather than requiring employees to continuously search for problems, the objective should be to make the exceptions easier to identify. This changes the role of information. Instead of simply recording what has happened, accurate and accessible information can help teams decide where their attention is required next.

For apparel businesses dealing with large numbers of styles, colours, sizes, customer orders, suppliers and stock movements, that distinction becomes increasingly valuable as transaction volumes grow.

Self-service can be good customer service

Customer self-service is another part of the equation. There can sometimes be an assumption that good customer service means personally handling every interaction, but customers don’t necessarily want to make a phone call or send an email simply to find routine information. Sometimes good service means making that information readily available when the customer needs it.

One example can be seen at David Luke, where Protex interfaces with a customer portal. Retail customers can check stock availability, place and track orders, make payments and review purchasing history. According to the business, these capabilities have relieved pressure on its Customer Service team, giving employees more time to liaise with customers, plan deliveries and concentrate on exceptions and queries requiring their expertise.

The important point here isn’t simply that customers can do more themselves. It’s what employees can do with the time that is freed up. Removing routine enquiries creates more opportunity for people to concentrate on interactions where their knowledge and involvement can make a real difference.

Automation isn’t the answer to everything

There is, however, a danger in looking at every repetitive process and immediately deciding it should be automated. Before asking whether something can be automated, it is worth stepping back and asking why the task exists in the first place.

A manual task may exist because two systems don’t communicate. A report might be recreated every week because the underlying information isn’t easily accessible. Someone may be rekeying an order because information cannot move easily between one part of the business and another. Automating a poorly designed process doesn’t necessarily resolve the underlying issue.

Instead, businesses can look at where the information originates, whether somebody is entering information that already exists elsewhere, whether the relevant employee or customer could access it directly and, importantly, whether the task actually requires judgement. It is also worth considering what would happen if the volume of that activity doubled. Questions like these can reveal opportunities not merely to automate existing tasks, but to remove unnecessary steps altogether.

Growth shouldn’t automatically mean more administration

This becomes particularly important as the business scales. If every increase in orders creates a corresponding increase in administration, eventually growth becomes dependent on continually adding resource simply to keep existing processes running.

That isn’t always necessary. David Luke, for example, says Protex has helped it improve efficiency across the business and achieve considerable growth over a five-year period without needing to expand its team. The company also describes using paperless barcode-based warehouse processes to save time and virtually eliminate picking errors, alongside improved access to management information.

The wider lesson isn’t that growing businesses shouldn’t recruit. It is that transaction growth and headcount growth don’t necessarily need to move in lockstep. Technology and better-connected processes can absorb some of the additional workload, leaving businesses free to invest in people where they create greater value.

Give your people better problems to solve

Perhaps this is the most important point. Reducing routine administration isn’t about diminishing people’s roles; it’s about making better use of their skills and experience. People build customer relationships, negotiate with suppliers, spot unusual patterns, understand context, resolve ambiguity and make judgement calls that a standard process cannot.

In an apparel business, that might mean a merchandiser investigating why a product has suddenly accelerated in one channel rather than spending time assembling the data needed to discover that fact. It could mean a customer service employee proactively resolving an order at risk rather than answering another routine request for order status, or a manager concentrating on the decisions behind the numbers rather than spending half a day bringing those numbers together.

That’s a different way to think about efficiency. Rather than simply trying to do the same work more quickly, the objective becomes creating more capacity for the work that matters most.

Make the system carry more of the workload

For apparel and footwear businesses, achieving this becomes easier when information and processes are connected rather than fragmented across different systems and manual workarounds. An apparel-specific ERP such as Datel Protex can provide a core operational platform across products, purchasing, inventory, sales orders and fulfilment. The opportunity is to make information accessible where it is needed and allow routine processes to flow with less manual intervention.

Technology shouldn’t replace the knowledge and experience that exists within the team. It should give people the time and information to apply that knowledge where it makes the biggest difference.

As an apparel business grows, there will always be exceptions to manage, customers to support and decisions to make. The aim should be to ensure that valuable people aren’t spending too much of their day keeping routine processes moving when their skills could be better used elsewhere.