FileMaker Go Gets Dressed for Success

Claris Editorial Team
FileMaker
Published in
3 min readDec 20, 2016

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.

The Challenge

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.

The FileMaker app for iPad gives the team unmatched insight into production data.

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.

Not only did Linear Blue 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.

— Peter Joyce, Managing Director, TOT Shirts

The FileMaker Solution

Working with FileMaker Business Alliance Platinum 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.

TOT Shirts delivers more than 3 million branded items of clothing annually.

Notable Benefits

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 warehouse team efficiently manages clothing stock
with FileMaker Go for iPad.

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.

Want to learn more about FileMaker? Check out our resources page or download a free trial.

If you have a custom app story you’d like to share, please submit your story here. We’d love to know how you use FileMaker!

--

--