Fast Fashion: Garment Line Production Efficiency
THE CHALLENGE
Fast fashion a growing trend in clothing manufacturing that refers to the rapid production of high value clothing collections that mimic current trends, allowing retailers to quickly respond to market demands and consumer preferences.
Achieving this level of agility in a largely manual production environment is a significant challenge at the best of times but leading clothing manufacturers who get it right are capitalising on their competitive advantage.
Clothing factories need to be able to successfully navigate the following manufacturing challenges to be able to meet Fast Fashion demands.
- Skilled Labour Dependency: Manual clothing production relies on skilled workers, necessitating continuous recruitment, training, and retention efforts to maintain quality and meet the increasing demand for fast fashion.
- Limited Production Speed: Manual processes can limit production speed due to the time-consuming nature of tasks like cutting, sewing, and finishing, affecting overall output and responsiveness to demand.
- Quality Control Challenges: Manual production lines face quality control issues due to human variability, impacting the ability to consistently deliver high-quality products within tight timelines demanded by fast fashion trends.
- Workflow Coordination: Efficient coordination of tasks and workers is essential to streamline production and meet fast fashion demands, minimizing delays and ensuring quick turnaround times.
- Cost Management and Competitiveness: Labor-intensive manual production can lead to higher costs, necessitating strategic cost management strategies to remain competitive in the fast fashion market where speed and affordability are key factors.
BUSINESS OBJECTIVE
Running agile, efficient garment production lines are critical for clothing manufacturers to survive and thrive in the world of fast fashion.
To do so, factory managers need the data intelligence to inform appropriate production planning, adaptable resourcing to meet changing demand and an ever efficient labour force to meet hourly production targets.
Reliable production data should be automated, objective and presented in real time with sufficient analysis to determine actionable insights that can help the operation be more effective.
THE SOLUTION
- visionTrack leverages existing factory cameras that monitor operator stations along garment production lines.
- visionTRACK monitor operator stations to determine individual operator availability and performance that sums up to the availability and performance of a garment line.
- Operator performance is measured as the individual operator cycle time working on a single garment that is timed and counted, and again summed up to measure against both individual and line performance targets
- visionTRACK is able to monitor subtle operator activities that other sensors and tools simply cannot measure (providing valuable insight to help inform training and development opportunities)
- visionTRACK is able to detect minute by minute inefficiencies that supervisors responsible for multiple operators and production lines simply cannot track.
- Objective Overall Labour Efficiency (OLE) insights from the passive monitoring of garment lines becomes the cornerstone of production line efficiency.
TECHNOLOGY USED
- Existing factory cameras that monitor operator stations along a garment production line
- visionTrack Computer Vision solution
THE RESULT
Fast Fashion clothing manufacturers can look at to visual AI to act as a 24/7 Digital Supervisor to actively build an objective, reliable and “always on” view of critical production metrics.
For the average visionAI customer, every 5 min of production downtime saved, equates to tens of thousands of dollars additional production output each month.
