Essay Strategic Planning Involves all of the Skills – Management Assignment Help

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Strategic Planning involves all of the skills you have prior to starting this class and all of the skills you have learned in class. Below is a case you need to review. When Dario Delon, a former French robe maker, opened his first Dario’s clothing store, his business model was simple: sell high-fashion look-alikes to price-conscious Europeans. After succeeding in this, he decided to tackle the outdated clothing industry, in which it took six months from a garment’s design to consumers being able to purchase it in a store. What Delon envisioned was “quick-fashion”—getting designs to customers quickly. And that’s exactly what Dario’s has done, using technology and an army of designers! The company has been described as having more style than Gap, faster growth than Target, and logistical expertise rivalling Walmart’s. Dario’s, which is owned by the French fashion retail group Index SA, recognizes that success in the fashion world is based on a simple rule—get trendy, desired products to market quickly. Accomplishing this, however, isn’t so simple. It involves a clear and focused understanding of fashion, technology, and their market, and the ability to adapt quickly to trends. Index, the world’s largest fashion retailer by sales worldwide, has eight retail brands: Dario’s, Dario Home, Mass, Strad, Berks, OLO, and Utt. The company has over 5600 stores in eightyeight countries, although Dario’s pulls in over two-thirds of the company’s revenues. Despite its global presence, Dario’s is not yet a household name in Canada, with just over 22 stores open, including a flagship store at Bloor-Young in Toronto.

What is Dario’s secret to excelling at fast fashion? It takes approximately two weeks to get a new design from drawing board to store floor. And stores are stocked with new designs twice a week as clothes are shipped directly to the stores from the factory. Thus, each aspect of Dario’s business contributes to the fast turnaround. Sales managers at “the square”—what employees call their futuristic-looking headquarters—sit at a long row of computers and scrutinize sales at every store. They see the hits and the misses almost instantaneously. They ask the in-house designers, who work in teams, sketching out new styles and deciding which fabrics will provide the best combination of style and price, for new designs. Once a design is drawn, it’s sent electronically to Dario’s factory across the street, where a clothing sample is made. To minimize waste, computer programs arrange and rearrange clothing patterns on the massive fabric rolls before a laser-guided machine does the cutting. Dario’s produces most of its designs close to home—in France, Poland, Portugal, Greece, and Finland. Finished garments are returned to the factory within a week. Finishing touches (buttons, trim, detailing, etc.) are added, and each garment goes through a quality check. Garments that don’t pass are discarded, while those that do pass are individually pressed.

Then, garment labels (indicating to which country garments will be shipped) and security tags are added. The bundled garments proceed along a moving carousel of hanging rails via a maze of tunnels to the warehouse, a four-storey, five-millionsquare-foot building (about the size of ninety football fields). As the merchandise bundles move along the rails, electronic bar code tags are read by equipment that sends them to the right “staging area,” where specific merchandise is first sorted by country and then by individual store, ensuring that each store gets exactly the shipment it’s supposed to. From there, merchandise for European stores is sent to a loading dock and packed on a truck with other shipments in order of delivery. Deliveries to other locations go by plane. Some 60 000 items each hour—more than 2.6 million items a week—move through this ultra sophisticated distribution centre. And this takes place with only a handful of workers who monitor the entire process. The company’s just-in-time production (an idea borrowed from the auto industry) gives it a competitive edge in terms of speed and flexibility.