The vibrant Bangladesh’s RMG industry has seen many ups and downs before reaching a place where it is established today. However, struggles are still continuing, orders are fluctuating and long-term sustainability of businesses has seen a dent due to COVID-19 pandemic.
That’s where eRMG – a SaaS platform – has emerged that aims at helping apparel manufacturers eliminate the bottlenecks and make the experience of garment sourcing easier in post-pandemic era.
During a conversation with Apparel Resources, Asif Hossain, who is one of three co-founders of eRMG, commented that this new initiative offers buyers and suppliers/manufacturers of fashion apparel the ability to gain control over their value chain, from ideation till completion.
Of late, Bangladeshi manufacturers have been struggling due to the lack of negotiation opportunities and they still have to be dependent on a specific buyer market and particular production demand.
This obstacle is where eRMG is helping manufacturers in Bangladesh as its recent research has shown that the volume of low MOQ orders globally is growing due to the movement towards sustainability. Thus, as says Asif, eRMG helps open the small to medium manufacturers of Bangladesh to the global demand of low or no MOQ production.
“eRMG provides a core fundamental need that every buyer looks for during their sourcing journey: to be able to trust and rely on their vendors. With our validation and audit team, every supplier that onboards eRMG must undergo unique and transparent verification process, which helps establish reliability and compliance between the parties involved,” informed Asif, adding, “eRMG also assists in opening up a path of negotiation for suppliers so they can receive better value for their manufactured goods.”
eRMG’s SaaS offers services such as providing a virtual presence for order and supply chain management; complete accountability of manufacturers for due diligence; streamlined processes with the help of an efficient data-driven routing algorithm; generate diverse order ranges from non-traditional buyers of the market; educating buyers on how to convey their requirements to suppliers professionally; project management utilisation across all processes in the apparel supply chain; communication suite within our SaaS to shorten the feedback loop and lead time; vendor managed inventory for material sourcing and planning; design recommendation for hassle-free product development; and live updates of production activity and commercial documentation.
According to Asif, the idea of eRMG incepted when he, with his Co-founder Yusuf Ahmed, was discussing in the summer of 2020 how the fashion sourcing industry was evolving for Bangladesh year on year and how the pandemic could be detrimental.
“One month later, we started to brainstorm on the business ideas and the design and development of our SaaS. Two months from the summer of 2020, I met Martin Strommer, Co-founder of nCinga (a Singapore-based apparel manufacturing software company) who later joined us as our third Co-founder. Since then, eRMG has diligently worked on market validation, research and development to start our pilot testing phase in the next few months,” shared Asif.
Currently, eRMG has been working with four small to medium manufacturers and three retail entities to pilot the platform. “We plan to launch public beta testing in the next two months,” mentioned Asif.
Although Bangladesh is the company’s initial market where it’s conducting extensive studies to learn its implementation, eRMG has plans to expand into other South Asia, ASEAN and European markets.
