The only place where Zara's is predicting heavily its ordering its fabrics. Fabrics are considered raw materials and need to be present before the season starts due to long lead times. Anyhow, there is still efficiency applied in this process. The fabrics are ordered uncolored and this gives flexibility to change the color depending on the trends. As Cai-feng (2009) mentioning: majority of stock is held as “work-in-process” awaiting configuration instructions. Zara is balancing its in-house and outsourcing activities. For example heavy labour tasks like sewing and coloring are outsourced to companies close to its headquarter, often with bad reputation for mistreating its employees and poor compensations (Dutta, 2002). On the other hand activities like design, prototyping and computer aided fabric cuts are held in-house to help agility. After clothes are assembled and return from the sewing factories, they are distributed to Zara's stores. To ensure that each order could arrive at destination punctually, laser barcode scanners, which are able to pick and sort over 80 000 pieces of clothes with a error rate of less than 0.5%, will be adopted in sorting the finished products (Zhang, 2008).