Importance of Apparel Engineering

Objectives

The primary responsibility of Apparel Engineering as a Manufacturing activity is to produce a product at Pre-estimated cost, at specified quality with the stipulate time schedule. The key objectives can be the control of

1. Manufacturing cost
2. Manufacturing schedule
3. Method of production
4. Improving efficiency and quality
5. Better utilization of resources
6. Reduce waste ( bot man and material)

Some major activities in Apparel Engineering are explained below for the reader’s easy understanding.

a) Production Planning: - production planning is a pre-operation activity. It aims at anticipating the probable difficulties so that they can be eliminated before they materialize and before they become grave. Production planning is the planning of production and manufacturing process in an industry. It utilizes the resource allocation of activities of employees, Materials and production capacity.

Different types of production methods, such as single item manufacturing, batch production, mass production, continuous production etc. have their own type of production planning.

b) Production control: - Production control is a "set of actions and decision taken during production to regulate output and obtain reasonable assurance that the specification will be met.

The American Production and Inventory Control Society, nowadays APICS, defined production control in 1959 as:

“Production control is the task of predicting, planning and scheduling work, taking into account manpower, materials availability and other capacity restrictions, and cost so as to achieve proper quality and quantity at the time it is needed and then following up the schedule to see that the plan is carried out, using whatever systems have proven satisfactory for the purpose.”

Production planning and control in larger factories is often run from a production planning department run by production controllers and a production control manager. Production monitoring and control of larger operations is often run from a central space, called a control room or operations room or operations control centre (OCC).

c) Inventory Control: - otherwise known as stock control is defines as the “activity of checking and controlling the industries use of inventory. The goal of inventory control is to generate the maximum profit from the least amount of inventory investment without intruding upon customer satisfaction levels. Given the impact of customers and profits, inventory control is one of the chief concerns of business that have large inventory investment, such as in Apparel industry have more than 80% of fabric and materials as inventory.

Some of the more common areas in which to exercise inventory control are in Raw Materials availability, Finished Good availability, work in process, Reorder point, Bottleneck enhancement, and Outsourcing etc. Inventory Optimization is the method of balancing capital investment constraints or objectives and service-level goals over a large assortment of stock keeping units (SKUs) while taking demand and supply volatility into account

d) Quality Control: - Quality control is procedure or set of procedures intended to ensure that a manufactured product adheres to a defined set of quality criteria or meets the requirements of the client or customer.

Quality control is similar to, but not identical with, Quality Assurance (QA) is defined as a set of procedures intended to ensure that a product under development (before work is complete) meets specified requirement. Or is a way of preventing mistakes or defects in manufactured products and avoiding problems when delivering to customers. QA is applied to physical products in pre-production to verify what will be made, raw materials, specific requirements and during manufacturing production runs by validating lot samples meet specific quality. Quality assurance comprises administrative and procedural activities implemented in a quality system so that requirements and goals for a product, service or activity will be fulfilled. It is the systematic measurement, comparison with a standard, monitoring of processes and an associated feedback loop that confers error prevention. This can be contrasted with quality control, which is focused on process output.

Two principles included in quality assurance are: "Fit for Purpose" (the product should be suitable for the intended purpose); and "Right First Time" (mistakes should be eliminated). QA includes management of the quality of raw materials, assemblies, products and components, services related to production, and management, production and inspection processes.

Suitable quality is determined by product users, clients or customers, not by society in general. It is not related to cost, and adjectives or descriptors such as "high" and "poor" are not applicable. For example, a low priced product may be viewed as having high quality because it is disposable, where another may be viewed as having poor quality because it is not disposable

e) Method Study: - Method study is the process of subjecting work to systematic, critical scrutiny to make it more effective and/or more efficient. It is one of the keys to achieving productivity improvement. It was originally designed for the analysis and improvement of repetitive manual work but it can be used for all types of activity at all levels of an organisation. The process is often seen as a linear, described by its main steps of:

Select (the work to be studied); à Record (all relevant information about that work); à Examine (the recorded information); à Develop (an improved way of doing things); à Install (the new method as standard practice); à Maintain (the new standard proactive).

Although this linear representation shows the underlying simplicity of method study, in practice the process is much more one of repeated passes through the sequence of steps with each, dominating at a different stage of the investigation. The cyclic process often starts with a quick, rough pass in which preliminary data are collected and examined before subsequent passes provide and handle more comprehensive and more detailed data to obtain and analyse a more complete picture.

f) Work place Engineering: - it is the method of reducing fatigue to the operators which causes reduction in production. There are a lot situations may result a production reduction, such as, the obstruction in machine preventing the operator from easy body movement for some specific operations, the distance from feed and delivery points, time to do marking, labelling etc. to the pieces for easy sewing, etc. the apparel engineer should study such factors affecting the operator to give his maximum output, and sometimes modification of machine or machine parts may help to reduce this issue.

The use of folders, guides, attachments for feed and delivery, thread cutters, different head arrangements of a machine, adjusting the height of the stools, tables according to the operator etc. are some examples for the workplace modifications. These modifications are conditional to the specific industry according to the ergonomics requirements, difficulty of the operator etc. There are no standard methods to be specified but there are general uses of the principle and followed methods may explained in following chapters.

g) Cost reduction and Control: - Cost is an important factor in industry which directly affects the profit of the industry. There are mainly two types of costs involved in an industry Value Added Cost (VA) and Non-Value Added Cost (NVA)

The Value Added Cost (VA) activities focus on any activity or cost that customer is willing to pay for, this generally include the cost for Raw Materials, Production, delivery etc. but Non-Value Added Cost (NVA) activities describe that the customer does not consider as adding value to his product, such as waiting charges, inspection charges, alteration expenses, etc. in an apparel industry as it is majorly based on human activities there may be huge amount of NVA acting.

One of the way to reduce wastages can be reduce or eliminate NVA that can result in the reduction in time, cost and lead time. Lead Time means the time or duration required between the first receipt of a customer order and customer receipt of the product. As it is known that time is money, if more time required in a product more money is involved. For big apparel manufacturing companies that makes thousands of garments in an year, saving of 20 cents in a garment is a lot of money. Most apparel manufactures take care to make changes that won’t be spotted easily by consumers, to reduce the fabric consummation which effects the direct cost.

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