Tamale – Northshore Apparel Ghana, a new knitted garment manufacturer backed by the Ghanaian and German governments, has selected Coats Digital’s GSDCost, FastReactPlan and FastReactFabric solutions for its forthcoming apparel manufacturing hub in northern Ghana.
The purpose-built facility will focus on knitted and woven garments for international fashion brands.
The new campus, being developed on more than 50 acres of reclaimed land, is described by the company as Northern Ghana’s first integrated apparel hub.
It is designed as a zero-waste operation and will specialise in T-shirts, polos, fleece hoodies, children’s wear, sportswear, underwear, leggings and trousers, giving it a broad base in circular and warp-knit jersey fabrics as well as woven bottoms.
For knitting mills and their brand customers, the most immediate impact will come from the deployment of GSDCost to set standard times and labour costs at style and operation level. Coats Digital’s GSD method-time standards will be used to establish precise sewing and assembly benchmarks, supporting accurate minute value calculations and fair wage structures on high-volume knit styles such as T-shirts and fleece garments.
FastReactPlan will provide capacity planning, order visibility and line loading across the new plant’s knitting, cutting and sewing operations. The system is intended to support fast, detailed scheduling and line balancing, particularly for short-run, late-change or style-intensive programmes typical of fashion jersey and sportswear orders.
FastReactFabric will be used to manage fabric buying, allocation and utilisation across the knit and woven portfolio. Northshore aims to reduce fabric waste and avoid over-buying by improving fabric yield calculations and tracking consumption by style and season, a critical factor in managing margins on commodity knitwear programmes.
According to Northshore, the integrated Coats Digital platform is expected to eliminate data silos between costing, planning and fabric management teams. This should help shift the factory from reactive firefighting to proactive control of labour, fabric and delivery performance, an increasingly important requirement for brands sourcing time‑sensitive knitted basics and performance styles.
“From the beginning, our ambition was to build far more than a factory,” said Nurideen Mohammed, co‑founder and CEO of Northshore Apparel Ghana Ltd. “We were looking for an integrated solution that would give us control over our most critical cost drivers — labour, fabric and delivery performance — while allowing us to operate proactively, not reactively.”
The project forms part of a wider regeneration initiative aimed at tackling chronic unemployment in Northern Ghana and reducing migration to the south and to Europe. Northshore is currently training 2,000 employees, with a further 1,000 hires expected soon and an additional 7,000 by the end of the year, taking total employment towards 10,000.
The site will also incorporate social and environmental features including free daily meals, on-site medical care, a creche for nursing mothers, prayer rooms and safe changing facilities. A training academy will focus on upskilling young people and women, while anaerobic biodigesters, water recycling for irrigation and on-site solar power are planned to support the zero-waste ambition.
Coats Digital sees the project as a reference case for digitally enabled, socially focused apparel manufacturing in the West African cotton belt. “By deploying our suite of solutions as an integrated ecosystem, Northshore Apparel is setting itself up for long-term resilience, operational excellence and ethical growth,” said Himanshu Mehrotra, managing director at Coats Digital.
Located close to regional cotton production, the hub is intended to support shorter, more resilient supply chains for brands seeking alternatives to Asia for basic and value‑added knitwear.
