Visit to some MAS ACTIVE plants

MAS’ holdings have currently 9 active plants. They are shadow line, shadeline, contourline, leisureline, sleek line, synergy, asialine, linea intimo, linea AITC. The plants I have visited were Active centre, Nirmana, Shadowline, Leisureline and linear intimo. Normally MAS biggest customer is Nike and also they are doing for jocky, addidas, tezenis, anntaylor, becham , ronisch etc.

In active centre they are divided to each brand for merchandising purpose and they have a big group for Nike specialy.and they have financed, planning, IT and HR people as well. These people sometimes go to plants and work with the plants as well.

Nirmana is the product development centre. It was situated in katunayaka trade zone. There they do all product sampling for all active plants. After they did sample they are getting approval from buyer and then they distribute samples to plants for bulk sewing. In PDC they have machine operators who are multi skill operators. The environment of this plant was developed specially to attract customers who are coming there.

Leisureline which was in katunayaka trade zone, it is Nike approved plant but currently they are doing Tezinis and Anntaylor. And they were going to do Ronisch as next brand. In tezinis mainly focus on ladies under wear. This brand also running n sleek line as well. In this plant they have stores, cutting, sewing etc. They are doing fabric inspection randomly and fabric relaxing for the fabrics which contain spandex and polyester normally. In cutting they are using automatic spreaders, hand cutters and band knife. Also they do manual spreading as well. They have 23 modules, normally in one module they allocated 13-15 operators according to the operations SMV (standard minute value). After sewing they storing the finished goods and shipping them. Apart from this they have their HR, finance, IT, work study, method study, laboratory and other people as well, it and most people as well.

Shadowline situated in katunayaka trade zone. We visited there specially to see printing and embroidery and also they have centralised stores, it was the big store for all active plants. Then they have hand printing as well as machine printing, but most customers prefer hand printing from them. And here they are doing design development for printing to active plants and then send them to required plants. They have 2 embroidery machines which has several heads on that. Then they have separate cutting departments for sleek line and for them as well. They have automatic spreaders and also doing the hand spreading as well. They have hand cutters, band knife and CNC cutters (3 Lectra cutters).in sewing they have 28 sewing teams. On that time we were visited they are doing Nike t-shirts.and they have lab facility to check the color fastness to washing, shrinkage or growth etc.

Linea intimo it was situated in biyagama trade zone, it was a totally different factory from all active plants. They are doing especially seamless garments. They are getting yarns and by using circular knitting machines they are knitting the fabric they need for production. For greigh fabric they have dying section as well. Then they have 100% Inspection and provide them to sewing plants. Especially the defects on fabric after knitting and color shading encountered by this inspection .then they send those to sewing lines they cut the garment parts using over lock machine without threading that. They have 19 sewing line include 10 operators. They have design and innovation department. In that department they have big team for Addidas and other small teams for Nike etc. There is a team for planning future design as well. They have small cutting department for seam garments. They using hand spreading and hand cutters.