The Best Textile Software
For over 25 years, we’ve guided textile and apparel businesses with software advice, culminating in a ranked guide to top textile ERP solutions based on manufacturing and design capabilities.
- Multi-channel sales and multi-warehouse inventory
- Offers integrated accounting
- Built-in PLM and CRM
- Affordable pricing
- Built-in CRM tools
- Interactive production calendar and Gantt charts
- Open-source architecture
- Multilingual support
- Highly customizable
Textile ERP software is a digital tool for the apparel industry that streamlines design, production, distribution, and sales. To help you choose the right solution for your business, we used our software review methodology to evaluate and rank the top textile and apparel ERP software in the market today.
- ApparelMagic: Best Overall
- MRPeasy: Best for Small Manufacturers
- ERPNext: Best Open-Source ERP
- Infor MES: Best for Smart Manufacturing
- FDM4 ERP: Best Integration Options
- WinMan ERP: Best for Lean Manufacturing
1 ApparelMagic - Best Overall
Why we chose it: ApparelMagic is our top choice for fashion brands with international operations. It offers multi-currency accounting and multi-channel sales. The software’s inventory module allows real-time tracking in various ways, ensuring full visibility and control over stock levels. Moreover, ApparelMagic facilitates efficient order management, helping brands streamline their pick-and-pack processes and prioritize orders to meet customer demands.
The software’s supply chain management tools allow for detailed tracking of projects throughout the supply chain, providing options to sort data by vendor, style, or project. This ensures that production schedules align with sales deadlines. Additionally, ApparelMagic’s warehouse management feature alerts when stock levels are low in any warehouse, enabling inventory transfers and synchronization with B2B and B2C platforms.
2 MRPeasy - Best for Small Manufacturers
Why we chose it: MRPeasy streamlines production management for small manufacturers, making it our top choice for this segment. It’s an AI-powered solution tailored for businesses with 10 to 200 employees. MRPeasy provides accurate production planning and reporting, ensuring apparel manufacturers can promise realistic lead times. Its real-time inventory overview helps prevent stock-outs and lower inventory levels, while also facilitating on-time deliveries.
MRPeasy’s integrated manufacturing software includes advanced tools for production planning, stock management, purchasing, and sales management through its CRM system. This is all underpinned by clear accounting insights to monitor business performance. Ultimately, MRPeasy is designed to replace spreadsheets and unify sales, production, warehousing, procurement, administration, and finance for smaller organizations.
3 ERPNext - Best Open-Source ERP
Why we chose it: ERPNext is appealing for its open-source nature, allowing businesses to customize the software to their unique needs. Users can modify existing modules (like inventory, CRM, manufacturing) or create new ones to cater to unique business processes specific to the apparel industry. Additionally, custom reports and dashboards can be created to provide insights into trend analysis, inventory turnover, and production efficiency.
Overall, the platform can handle financial accounting, order management, HR and payroll, manufacturing, CRM, and more. With over 1,000 objects to help run various business operations, ERPNext provides a real-time view of cash flow and covers every aspect of bookkeeping. We found it efficient for sales and purchase cycles management, multilevel bill of materials, employee lifecycle management, and production planning.
4 Infor MES - Best for Smart Manufacturing
Why we chose it: Infor MES digitizes all manufacturing operations and integrates with ERP systems. This platform can connect to sensors and devices embedded in manufacturing equipment to collect data on machine performance, product quality, environmental conditions, etc. Additionally, Infor MES leverages the Internet of Things (IoT) technology to enhance further connectivity and data exchange between devices and the system.
We found that Infor MES can enhance quality control processes by providing real-time monitoring and analytics of production operations. For textiles, where fabric quality, dye consistency, and pattern accuracy are crucial, the system can identify deviations from standards immediately, allowing for quick corrective actions. Finally, Infor MES enables bi-directional traceability useful for compliance with regulations and standards, like those related to sustainable and ethical materials sourcing.
5 FDM4 ERP - Best Integration Options
Why we chose it: FDM4 ERP has strong integration capabilities especially beneficial for the apparel industry. Notably, it integrates with major shipping carriers like UPS and FedEx and supports EDI integration, facilitating smooth communication with manufacturers and distributors. The software also offers seamless data synchronization across multiple locations, enhancing supply chain efficiency.
FDM4 provides specialized features in accounting, inventory management, and order processing tailored specifically for the apparel industry. We think its business intelligence tools via dashboards was a plus, making it a comprehensive system for apparel businesses seeking end-to-end functionality and visibility.
6 WinMan ERP - Best for Lean Manufacturing
Why we chose it: WinMan focuses on optimizing business processes through lean manufacturing principles. We found its inventory management tools adept at maintaining just-in-time inventory levels. By minimizing excess stock and reducing storage costs, WinMan supports the lean goal of reducing waste and improving cash flow.
Additionally, WinMan includes quality management features that help maintain high product quality and comply with industry standards. The system supports the lean focus on quality by emphasizing defect prevention and continuous improvement. Finally, WinMan’s flexible production scheduling enables apparel manufacturers to quickly adapt to changing fashion trends and consumer demands, reducing lead times and ensuring timely delivery of new styles.
What is Textile Software?
Textile software, also known as textile ERP software or textile industry software, aids in designing and manufacturing textiles made with animal, plant, mineral, and synthetic materials. This manufacturing is unique from other more commonly thought of production methods as it handles processes such as wave patterns, clothing material, structure, and more.
The collection of applications found in textile software ranges from pattern making, product lifecycle management, computer-aided design (CAD), production scheduling and planning (manufacturing), and even point of sale (POS) for retail operations.
Primarily, when discussing what textile software is, you can break it down into software used for the production of textiles, and software used for the design process before production.
- Textile manufacturing software aids in producing textiles, garments, and home furnishings through inventory management, accounting, real-time order entry, and production tracking through shipping and billing.
- Textile design software (or fabric design software) involves creating the designs that will be printed on your fabrics. Mostly includes the pattern-making and creative process before production occurs. Usually involves the use of graphic design programs or CAD software.
Most businesses want a textile ERP software that can do it all–meaning a business management software with functions and modules developed exclusively for textile, apparel, and fashion companies.
These sectors deal with variations in their product lines, such as different sizes, colors, and materials used to create similar products. Base applications offered by most textile ERP software providers will help manage your sales, plan your production, manage logistics (such as inventory), purchase needed goods, and ensure you’re costing your goods accurately.
Textile software can come in application-specific options focusing on spinning, knitting, weaving, printing, dyeing, nonwoven, carpet, etc. More importantly, the software will provide operational insights not offered by traditional manufacturing software. This means it takes into effect the considerable amount of adjustments and plans required in a textile production procedure.
Features of Textiles Software
- Design: Handles the image creation and editing involved in fabric designs. Includes repeats and separations, coloring, color-matching, presentation boards, engravings, tones, and more.
- Sales Order Management: Streamlines order processing by helping capture, track, and fulfill orders across multiple sales channels. Connects inventory and sales orders, creates shipping schedules, tracks fulfillment, and creates reports.
- Production Scheduling: Helps plan production on your shop floor by determining the need for materials and capacity to complete a production order. Creates a highly detailed production schedule that accounts for resource, staffing, and inventory needs.
- Inventory Management: Keeps track of all information about the items your company builds, buys, stores or sells. Simplifies pricing products and helps maintain the most effective stock levels.
- Purchasing: Create financial documents issued to vendors when buying supplies or services. Includes information such as product type, quantity, and pricing.
- Maintenance Management: Creates work orders for maintenance activities (such as preventive maintenance tasks and predictive maintenance scheduling) to help limit machine and equipment downtime and lengthen the lifecycle of assets.
- Electronic Data Interchange (EDI): Helps exchange business documents in a standard electronic format. Examples include shipping statuses, invoices, purchase orders, inventory documents, and customs information.
Benefits of Textiles Software
The top benefits of textile software include:
Improve Your Supply Chain Through Business Intelligence
Many textile companies choose to use advanced planning and scheduling (APS) software functionality to meet their production needs. This process helps designate raw materials and production capacity to balance demand and plant capacity to their optimal fulfillment level.
In other words, it can plan and schedule production based on available materials, labor, and equipment–all while tracking the costs involved, the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and improving material requirements planning (MRP).
This is considered a high-level approach to making sustainable business decisions, as it utilizes business intelligence data to improve managerial control over your operations. Having analytics about your production process can help improve the process quality control and flow of products through your production.
One example may be when your business desires to minimize costs. Users of textile software can assign various weights to different parts of the cost function. This cost function is helpful when dealing with samples and providing detailed tracking of sampling costs. A textile business may want to schedule sampling on machines during set periods of downtime, to ensure your operations (whether fiber, spinning, or cut and sew) are not interrupted.
Manage Complex Merchandise Inventory
Something unique to inventory in the textile and apparel industry is a size and color matrix. A color/size matrix is an inventory database management feature that provides more efficient database management by minimizing the number of records required to track different product combinations that vary by color or size.
This can sometimes be referred to as a “fashion matrix,” where manufacturers and retailers manage their product variants across a grid format to try and capture their product variants and align colors against sizes. This is appropriate when selling the same products in different sizes and colors.
Inventory in the textile industry can also be complex due to excessive or confusing inventory. As market demand fluctuates, so will your fulfillment dates, and these will need to be paired with your sales algorithms to maintain overall profit calculations.
As your variable costs change (such as manufacturing costs, overhead costs, and more), you should be able to make easy changes to your matrix to help anticipate the risks and rewards that come with market fluctuations.
Finally, a solid inventory management functionality within textile software can help simplify purchasing and vendor management. You’ll be able to record vendor details such as contact info, price lists, etc., which will let you grade your vendors based on their costs and performance.
Changing a purchase request into a purchase order quickly can help prevent procurement from exceeding any budget your business may be working with.
Provide Accessibility Through Mobile and Cloud Networks
Most ERP systems are online–eliminating the need to work at a single location. Employees can use web-based applications to access the system no matter where they are located–whether they are on a sales call, conducting quality checks at another location, etc.
Cloud solutions also help give you a leg up on your competition as they allow instant access to the newest updates offered by your software provider. As new businesses enter the market, you’ll want a solution to help you outlast your competitors.
Cloud-based ERP software also lets your employees access the solution from many devices, such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Allowing users to have real-time data access will allow managers to ensure that business operations are up to par at all times without any excuses for a delay in data entry.
Textile Software vs Apparel Software
It may be easy to compare the similarities between textile software and apparel software, given the type of material that is common between them. After all, textiles are often used for the manufacturing of apparel products. Does that mean a business can be just as suited with apparel ERP software as they would with textile software?
The short answer is maybe. Apparel ERP software is broad enough that it may be used to handle the needs of both apparel manufacturers and apparel retailers. This means the software can be used for clothing manufacturing, a fashion designer, or a high-end retailer.
It will most importantly offer a matrix inventory system to set size, color, and style variations and track each product as separate stock-keeping units (SKUs).
Meanwhile, the textile industry is generally involved in designing, manufacturing, and distributing clothes. Still, it has less to do with a clothing retail operation looking to order more goods or manage their eCommerce store.
Given that the names of the software are often used interchangeably, most businesses will be fine using one or the other. However, it will be essential to ask your software provider what the intended market is for the software. If you were a textile retailer, you wouldn’t want a solution intended for manufacturers and vice-versa.
