Client name . TOT-Shirts

Sector . Specialty apparel

Summary comment . Peter Joyce, Managing Director, TOT-Shirts Ltd.

"FileMaker Go is the product we have been waiting for since the launch of the iPad. That combined with Linear Blues' ability to quickly respond to our requirements for a mobile solution within our warehouse has saved us time and money. Not only did they deliver a working solution within 2 weeks of FileMaker Go being launched, but they understood the way we needed our warehouse staff to work and delivered a unique interface that was both easy to use and quick to learn. For us, that's a win-win situation."

TOT-Shirts

FileMaker Go Gets Dressed for Success

Delivering more than 3 million branded items of clothing to their customers every year, TOT-Shirts is one of Britain's largest garment decoration specialists. From its 36,000 sq ft headquarters in North London, TOT-Shirts provides a high-quality, end-to-end service to their clients for garment design, printing, embroidery and finishing needs.

With a client base that spans fashion retailers, the music industry, the world of sports, and many more, TOT-Shirts' dedicated team of 80 brings a wealth of experience and insight to their customers.

With the high number of garments processed by TOT-Shirts every year, the associated challenges of stock management are huge. With stock arriving on a regular basis, garments need to be checked in, allocated, picked and collected at various stages of the design process, with the corresponding database also needing to be updated as items move through the warehouse. As a result, the TOT-Shirts team was spending a great deal of time keeping their database synchronised with their stock.

Working with FileMaker Business Alliance member Linear Blue to identify an appropriate solution, TOT-Shirts found that a mobile tool such as FileMaker Go for iPad would be a great fit for their needs. FileMaker Go puts all of the vital information contained in a FileMaker Pro database into the palm of your hand, allowing users to search, view and edit information on the fly. Existing FileMaker Pro layouts look great on the iPad screen, with most requiring no modification, while fitting naturally and beautifully to the new display.

For the team at TOT-Shirts, FileMaker Go provides a real-time, easy to use solution that they can take anywhere.

Linear Blue's execution of TOT's FileMaker Go solution has generated instant benefits for the business, helping to compress a formerly lengthy process into a simple, one-step solution. Previously, that process involved booking stock in manually before moving it to stores, allocating jobs, re-picking the goods and sending the items to production. Now, with the release of FileMaker Go, garments go straight from the warehouse and into the production line. This has obvious implications not only in terms of time and money saved, but also for the company's green credentials, reducing the paper trail for this process and in turn the carbon footprint.

The use of FileMaker Go on the iPad has enabled TOT-Shirts' warehouse staff to have unprecedented access to live data on the system. Combined with an improved ability to track goods at all stages of production, not to mention the data quality benefits that come from having an up-to-the-second stock control solution, the solution has given TOT-Shirts an unmatched level of insight and efficiency into their data.

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