Will Flexible Production Become The Development Direction Of The Clothing Industry In 2016?

At present, the society's demand for clothing is not only for warmth, but also for individuality and fashion. A small number of different styles are both challenges and opportunities for clothing enterprises.

Rising online retailers Industry vs Clothing industry New requirements are put forward. With the development of e-commerce, there are more and more small orders from online brands: the first order of e-commerce is often only 100~500 pieces/model, and the same model may be repeated several times, but the single order is generally controlled at 200~600 pieces. Traditional factories generally lack the ability to handle small batch orders. Once the original mass production mode is applied to small batch orders, the cost will be greatly increased and the efficiency will be greatly reduced. Therefore, flexible production becomes the best choice. The essence of flexible supply chain lies in: small batch, multi batch and quick turnover. The core points of building a flexible supply chain are: cellular production design, lean production, preparation of flexible capacity, strong planning center, visual production line, and one-piece flow workshop model.

In order to realize the flexibility of flexible production, a combination of various forms can be used in the design of production systems.

Cell production mode: Compared with the traditional mass production mode, the cell production mode has two characteristics: one is small scale (short production line and few operators), the other is that the standardized small production cells can be simply copied. Because of these two characteristics, cell production mode can be realized

(1) Simply respond to the change of output, and by copying one or more cells can meet the production demand of an integral multiple of the cell production capacity;

(2) The number of workers in each cell is small, which reduces the difficulty of balancing the working time between stations. The working time difference between stations is small, and the production efficiency is high;

(3) By reasonably combining employees, that is, by combining employees with the same ability into cells, the highest level of operating ability of employees can be brought into play.

One stream production mode: One stream production mode is realized by canceling the handling of semi-finished products between processes, and allowing the single flow of pieces between machines through reasonable process arrangement and coherent layout between machines. Its advantages are:

1. Shorten the production cycle. Since the single piece flow is the synchronous operation of all production personnel in the separate process, it reduces the waste of human resources to the greatest extent, and the improvement of production efficiency greatly shortens the production cycle.

2. Reduce WIP inventory: because the single piece flow production mode is a backward pull production mode, that is, how much is needed in the last process and how much is produced in the previous process, so in its manufacturing process, each process runs synchronously once, that is, one finished product leaves the workshop. If there are no special circumstances, almost no inventory can be achieved.

3. Saving production space: because the single piece flow is a process of rapid production of finished products, there is no need to stock any materials in the production process, which greatly saves production space.

4. Reduce the number of defective products: the production mode of the single piece flow is to take one piece as the batch, and the whole assembly line will produce one finished product at a time, so problems can be found in time, and the probability of defective products is minimized.

5. Improve productivity: the essence of one-piece flow is unit synchronization, and each position is a unit. Habitual synchronous coordination has fostered the spirit of teamwork, high solidarity and high concentration, which has greatly improved productivity.

In the near future or for a long time in the future, flexible production of clothing will become the development direction of the clothing industry. Large scale batch production will be replaced by flexible production longer than multi variety and small batch production. Flexible production Clothing enterprises In terms of production efficiency, inventory management, supply chain management and shortening delivery time, it will be more competitive than traditional clothing production methods.