The Decoupling Strategy Of The Fast Fashion Clothing Leagile Supply Chain

As the world is stepping into the age of speed economy, the clothing market presents a trend of fast consumption. The product life cycle is getting shorter, and the demand for individuation is getting stronger. Under this background, fast fashion has caught the real demand of the changing market by its products, which have a friendly price, a variety of style, as well as fashionable. As a result, it gets great success rapidly. Fast fashion has an efficient supply chain to support its advantage in cost and speed. The main characteristics that distinguishit from traditional clothing is the hybrid leagile supply chain strategy. On one hand, the upstream lean part of the supply chain gets scaleeconomy through-leveling production. On the other hand, the downstream agile part of the supply chain aims at muti-varieties and small batch by quick response. Then, the key point to combine lean with agile is the decoupling strategy of the clothing supply chain.The decoupling strategy determines the integration level of lean and agile. It includes two topics:Firstly, the position of the decoupling point, namely from which process should the lean and agile supply chain separate. Secondly, the optimized inventory strategy of the decoupling point, namely as the strategic inventory, what kind of inventory strategy should be kept to minimize the relevant supply chain cost.The paper has analyzed the general information of fast fashion clothing industry, then makes a study on the characteristics of the leagile supply chain from four aspects:market, product, production mode and operation. Examples about ZARA and H&M are given to explore the integration methods of leagile clothing supply chain from three dimensions: product, demand and process, thus brings out the study about the method of process separation (namely decoupling point).Whereafter, the paper differentiates the meaning of decoupling pointfromthe perspective of leagile.It discussesthe decoupling point position of different kinds of clothing products. It also studies the four factors that will influence the position of the decoupling point:product, market, process and stock.Then the paper summarizes the effect decoupling point has on the clothing supply chain efficiency. And cost is chosen as the optimization target to analyse the trade-off phenomenon of the supply chain.Based on the dual goal of decoupling point position and optimized inventory strategy, the paper considers above trade-off relationship between manufacturer’s cost and retailer’s cost, and builds up a positioning model aiming at minimum supply chain total cost. Meanwhile an efficient method is deduced to find out the optimized inventory strategy of the decoupling point. At last, the paper designs a case study, an analysis tool named Mathematica is used to realize the whole program, and the validity of the model has been verified by the result. Meanwhile,the paper has done sensitivity analysis of the model from the perspective of demand variability, and explores the effect of expected value and standard deviation on the model cost.Based on the overall perspective of supply chain, the paper uses the retailer’s cost to quantify the time value of the decoupling point, both problems of positioning and optimized inventory strategy are solved. The achievement would provide some practical value to the fast fashion leagile supply chain.