Motivation
Jonsson Workwear International (JW International) is a major workwear clothing manufacturer that supplies customers in southern Africa, the USA and Europe. The head office and distribution centre in Durban runs a very large and complex system that controls activities in seven manufacturing plants: one in KwaZulu-Natal and six in the Kingdom of Lesotho.
These facilities produce over 15 000 garments each day and a stock level of over 350 000 garments is required to ensure constant availability for orders that are picked, packed and delivered to customers' premises.
Pierre Kriek, operational manager of the Lesotho factories explains, "Jonsson's rapid expansion from two to five factories in three years was causing us problems. We needed to monitor our staff working hours much more closely. Rising staff numbers (currently at 1500) added to the scale of the problem.
"We had a tag system in place but found there was a lot of fraud taking place. The cost of the cards and intensive administration effort were also an issue."
JW International already had a complex Impro network installed. All factories are wireless linked to the main administrative factory and each factory has an internal wireless network. All factories are also linked to JW International's Durban head office.
Dani Tabak, systems developer at Timewatch, comments, "We were familiar with the network as it was installed by us three years ago. One of our partners, Control Concepts, handles support for Clockwatch remotely via the Internet."
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