Fabric Optimizer

In today’s competitive market, manufacturers are facing continuous pressure to reduce costs, enhance productivity and deliver products at a faster pace.The opportunity for an Apparel Manufacturer to save costs by looking at their material costs is highest as Fabric costs account for over 70% of the overall costs the manufacturer bears.

By utilizing low cost labour and factory automation tools, many companies have successfully managed to reduce the operating costs to level where theres little scope for improvement. Nowaday automated fabric optimising software integrated with CAD systems serve as fabric cutting equipment. This tool helps in increasing efficiency of the individual fabric cutting operation during product development process. Such cut plan solution utilises highly advanced algorithms to automatically cut, balance and optimise the cost and time involved in the cutting operation. Lets look at how these this tool can enhance the cutting room efficiency for an apparel manufacturer.

1. Fabric Optimiser provides ready-to-cut production plans by recovering critical information from both the ERP and CAD systems and optimally selecting the fabric rolls to be used. Starting from the product orders, their due date and production quantities as well as roll inventory information such as batch information, colour, material expiration date, width and length, are collected from the ERP while product’s design data is retrieved from the CAD.

2. This tool helps to eliminate the guesswork of traditional manual and spreadsheet cut order planning methods used in fabric cutting operations. This tool guides users through every step of the product development process – from deciding what to cut to the last step of removing cut parts from the cutting table.

3. It saves up to 2 per cent to 8 per cent of overall materials by providing discrete manufacturers of all types with personalised, automatic solutions.

4. The Cut plan feature in the tool optimises the placement of parts on rectangular or non-rectangular sheets of fabrics. The unique high-speed algorithm makes it possible to quickly produce cuts with less offcuts. This is how manufacturers can produce optimised cutting layouts, minimise material wastage and maximise productivity.

5. Fabric Optimiser gives the best possible cut plan solution to efficiently generate nested layouts and detailed reports that help significantly in lowering the amount of fabric wastage and time and error in cutting layout preparation.

Just to cite an example, an apparel company in America with the usage of this tool now consumes around 10 per cent less material per year. In this way, it makes 250 versions of a blazers every season, offers customers an affordable price, and still succeeds in achieving profitable targets.