Hela Clothing recognized for its digital transformation at FITIS Digital Excellence Awards

Colombo: Hela Clothing, a leading end-to-end apparel supply chain solutions provider in Sri Lanka, has received the Silver Award for Workforce Enablement at the recently concluded Digital Excellence Awards. The award comes at a time when the company has embarked on a complete digital transformation to support its global growth while future-proofing the business.

Organised by the Federation of Information Technology Industry Sri Lanka (FITIS), the Digital Excellence Awards recognizes the achievements of organizations that have successfully planned and executed their digital transformation through migrating enterprises from Industry 3.0 to 4.0.

As part of phase one of Hela’s digital transformation strategy the company launched the HR 360 Programme. This programme aims to connect people, systems, and devices, via the Internet, thus digitalizing the process and generating actionable insights for management. The core of the programme is built on the Microimage MiHCM solution running on the Microsoft Azure platform. Employees are able to access the HR 360 Programme via an app on their phone.

Since its launch the company has achieved a number of key benefits which include real time data availability and digital empowerment of the workforce. The initial roll-out focused on Hela’s 9 locations in Sri Lanka and from January 2022 the app will be made available to their teams across Africa as well.

Expressing her opinion about the win, Ruwanthi Fernando, Chief Information & Process Officer –Hela Clothing, said, “We are proud to have been presented with such a prestigious award by FITIS. It underscores the fact that our digital transformation journey is heading in the right direction and further strengthens our resolve to see it through in a timely manner.”

She went on to add, “We are confident that the benefits we are seeing now are only the tip of the iceberg. Once completed, we expect our digital transformation journey to help strengthen our position and provide us with a launching pad to achieve greater innovation and prudent growth in the future.”

In addition to the HR 360 Programme, Hela’s digital roadmap includes the implementation of the SAP S/4HANA Fashion and Vertical Business solution to digitalize end-to-end processes by establishing the Digital Core, 3D prototyping and sampling to strengthen collaboration across geographies and reduce time to market, and robotic process automation that will allow the company to automate repetitive tasks allowing to reallocate resources to more value adding functions.

Coming on the heels of Hela being bestowed the Best Exporter Award, for apparel in the medium category, at this year’s Presidential Export Awards, this latest recognition further solidifies the company’s position as a resilient, agile and innovative player in the apparel industry.

Founded in 1996, FITIS is the apex body of the ICT industry in Sri Lanka covering all major industry segments as hardware, software, education training, communication, digital service, professional and office automation. FITIS enforces the highest level of transparency and impartiality in the evaluation process. Each nomination is reviewed and validated using a multi-tiered process and assessed by a panel of independent judges composed of industry thought leaders, veterans, and academia. The award categories and selection criteria are aligned to reflect today’s most critical business transformation areas and the framework of FITIS Digital Excellence Awards was developed modelling the industry standard Digital Transformation Assessment Framework.

Hela Clothing provides manufacturing solutions to some of the world’s top apparel brands including Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Michael Kors and VF Corp, through its 11 manufacturing facilities located in Sri Lanka and across east Africa. As part of its global expansion strategy, the company has also entered into partnerships with manufacturing facilities in Tanzania and Mozambique.