!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> Streamline Training & Documentation: Denmor Garment Manufacturers, Inc.

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Denmor Garment Manufacturers, Inc.

As a complement to yesterday's post concerning Kaieteur Falls in Guyana, I'd like to call attention to a noteworthy company in Guyana.

Source: Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business (pdf)

Denmor Garment Manufacturers is notable because it has adopted a employees-are-our-greatest-asset business model that is enabling the company to compete successfully in selling clothing on the world market.

Dennis Morgan founded Denmor with a partner in 1997. Since then, the company has grown to the point that it was exporting over 15,000 dozen garments per week to North America as of 2005.

As explained in a case study (pdf) prepared by the Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business in Trinidad,
Dennis Morgan was born and raised in poverty and never completed his secondary school education. Having also gone through a series of very low income jobs prior to establish[ing] Denmor, Morgan was motivated at the very outset to pull other people out of poverty and provide them with many of the opportunities he had been denied. He has had a particularly strong urge to help vulnerable women out of poverty and has actively provided training and jobs to women who are underprivileged, school dropouts, socially ostracised, single parents or otherwise disadvantaged.
Tough competition from the likes of China compelled Morgan to devise a strategy that would keep Denmor viable. He decided
to move into areas in which the company had a comparative advantage. Morgan found Denmor's advantage to be its capacity for the rapid delivery of relatively small orders of diverse high quality garments.
Morgan reports that he was convinced that his strategy would work only if he treated "employees as the most precious asset." One outgrowth of this view is that the company spends about USD 250,000 a year on training its 1,000 workers. Some of this training helps with basic literacy and numeracy; there is also considerable emphasis on cross-training.

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