Day 2 - Critical Path

For my work in the afternoon, I was back on the second floor of head office, surrounded by paperwork that had been thrust onto my desk along with a brief explanation of what I had to do.

My supervisor, Jo, had printed out a spreadsheet from excel, in the tiniest writing I have ever seen. Some columns were highlighted and some rows were marked off which made the whole thing seem extremely daunting.

She explained to me about the critical path, a buying term that showed which stage a particular product was at, in terms of production. There are many stages that the briefs have to go through before they make it out onto the shop floor.

For example, once the briefs have been designed and the colour palette has been decided upon, all of which takes place in the design department on the other side of the corridor. Different components of the briefs are dyed by the suppliers to try and match the colour that the designers have come up with. The suppliers are usually based in the far east so little pieces of dyed lace are shipped from China to the UK where the buying department check to see if the colour matches. If so, the next stage can start, if not, the sample is sent back to try again.

This dip dye process is near the beginning of the critical path, any time that a buyer approves a dye, the date is marked on the spreadsheet so that the rest of the team can tell at a glance, which stage the product is at.

It seemed daunting to start with; a spreadsheet filled with dates and terms and abbreviations that I didn't understand but after a full afternoon of filling in missing dates and flagging up inconsistencies, I was finally confident in reading the data without any supervision. I could now tell at a glance, that most of the briefs for AW10 had been approved for mass production, that most briefs for SS11 had been approved for colour, and when I was asked specific information on a specific brief style or colour, I knew how to use the spreadsheet to find out almost instantly.