Benchmarking Clothing Industry Effectiveness by Computer Simulation

The textile and apparel artefacts business is facing relevant restructuring, to manufacture items with enhanced value as for quality reliability and fashion inventiveness. The industrial area characterises by wit and knowledge driven settings, followed by labour intensive shop lay-outs and, so far, to improve effectiveness, productive break-up is exploited, with advertising and creative firms fed by decentralised processing sections, to distribute the work according to wages and skills figures. Business success is sought, balancing added value and cost reduction, by productive decentralisation aiming at preserving quality critical jobs under direct control (e.g. by means of automatic cutting machines) and transferring routine labour jobs (e.g. the sewing of already assorted pieces). The evolution coherently moves towards new organisations, based on distributed intelligence to grant value cycle monitoring, while enabling flexibility by production schedules assuring return on investment. The paper addresses innovation based on embedding information technology tools for the improved management of product flow, by means of fully exploiting known data, while avoiding redundancies as for, both, processing units and spare resources. First, basic organisational requirements are outlined, with reference methods to establish and assess improvements; then, enabling expert-simulation aids are reviewed, with explanatory discussion on apparel manufacturing environments. The option is purposely referred to the case development of an underwear sewing section to show the technicalities offered by intelligent manufacturing software and to provide hints for further developments.