Online Clothing Study

To become competitive and increase profit in manufacturing business resources like manpower should be utilized as max as possible. In business term, extra manpower means extra cost to the company. In such situation management must find a way for cost-cutting through manpower reduction wherever possible.
In this article, I will discuss the common things that you can do to reduce manpower in your factory. This article is written to answer the following question.

Question: I am from Bangladesh. I am doing the job in a readymade garment factory. In cutting and quality section we have extra manpower. How can I reduce extra manpower? Give me your valuable advice. This question is asked by OCS fan from Bangladesh.
The steps to take for reducing manpower are explained here.

1. Improve workers skill by training  When you have low skilled operators (workers) in your factory, normally you need to employ more people to produce planned quantity. A systematic training program for workers, that inc…

When we think of 'work study' in the garment industry we relate it with most of the activities done by the industrial engineering department. As the two major activities of work study - method study and time study is solely done by the industrial engineering department. Also known as work study department.
In garment manufacturing work study principles can be used in the cutting section, sewing section and finishing section as well. The purpose of work study is measuring work - like motion study and time study. Industrial engineering department is responsible for work study in the garment industry.

What is Work Study? You might be interested in definition of work study. Here it is
"Work study is a generic term for those techniques, particularly method study and work measurement, which are used in the examination of human work in all its contexts, and which lead systematically to the investigation of all the factors which affect the efficiency and economy of the situatio…

The production cycle in an export garment factory starts with the buyer placing an order with the exporter. The order consists of the garment style specifications, dimension specifications, fabric details, size set and order quantity. The order quantity further consists of one single order or multiple orders; single destination or multiple destinations; single colour or multi-colour fabric; and further a single packing ratio or individual packing ratio for each order for the same style of garment.


The garment styling details and dimension details are sent to the CAD/pattern-making department for the pattern maker to make patterns. He prepares patterns for the given size set as well as the shrinkage allowed patterns for the size set. Now, this is where the conventional factories and smart factories depart in their practices and smart factories save cost in cutting room a huge amount yearly.

In a smart factory, cut-plan precedes placing an indent for fabric. (cost saved !). For good fa…

I have written this blog post for newcomers. Every year thousands of students passed out from colleges, schools and fashion institutes and join to the main stream of fashion product manufacturing. Some of those join garment manufacturing.
In this article I will share my learning over two and half years of working in an export house. I hope my learning will help you to get better prepared and train yourselves to achieve success in shortest possible time.

I started my career in an apparel manufacturing company. I worked there about two and half years. Though it was a short span of working in manufacturing field, I had gained a lot of good and bad experiences. Here I have shared top 8 lessons.


#1. Show respect to your seniors  Good relationship with peers and colleagues matters a lot. After all you need support, guidance and right career direction from seniors and from the person you will report to. If you don’t respect them, you may not get support from them. I am sharing one of my sto…

You might already know what the Pantone Colour is. In fashion and home textile printing we follow a colour standard to match required print colour shade. The standard that is mostly used for colour matching in fashion and home is PANTONE colour matching system. We follow the colour printed on Pantone chips for reference. 

Most of the apparel buyers give reference to a Pantone colour code (example PANTONE 14–4510 TPX or Aquatic) to follow for print colour matching.

The Pantone colour matching book (Cotton swatch library) is costlier and small garment export houses/manufacturers normally don't buy this color matching guide book. When needed buying house and buyer used to send a cutting of Pantone colour chip with colour code number to their suppliers for printing and dyeing colour referene. 
Merchandisers experienced that it is difficult to share the small cutting of Pantone chip with printers/dyers when needed. At the same they need to keep part of the cutting for their referenc…

by Arnab Sen
Whenever we talk about fashion, we seem to discuss about something that is very light and happening! Can there be anything serious about fashion?

Can you help me find out a software program that calculates SAMS based on historical data?

This question was asked by an OCS fan. I thought to share my answer to this question with you as this is a common query comes from industrial engineers working in the readymade garment industry.



Answer:

Are you looking for a solution that can tell you product SAM (operation wise) from historical data?

I have two questions. (1) What do you mean by historical data? Do you have all historical data for operations cycle time/ capacity study data? (2) Are you planning to have something for capturing historical data?

Software is available to establish garment SAM (standard time for garment jobs/operations) which work just opposite way. It estimates operations standard minute (SAM) before you load garments on the machine. The estimated SAM is used in many ways in production planning, cost estimation, performance analysis, method improvement and operator training etc.

Read this post to know about available …

Garmentech Bangladesh, 15th International apparel machinery trade show, will be held in Dhaka from 13th January to 16 January, 2016.

ITMA 2015 is over. Many latest development in textile and apparel machines in different processes are displayed in this exhibition.

ITMA Sustainable Innovation Award was part of this exhibition. The winners were announced on 12 November at the ITMA 2015 Gala Dinner in Milan.

There are so many things and so many terms used in the apparel manufacturing process. End bits and end loss terminologies are associated with cutting section in a garment manufacturing plant.
While experts talk about fabric saving and improving cutting room performance, they focus on the losses as fabric waste.

You can increase savings from fabric by handling end bits intelligently and reducing end loss per ply.


What is End Bits? Before cutting, a fabric roll is opened and laid on the cutting table. The lay length is set at a certain length (known as marker length). The fabric at the end of each roll which can’t be laid on the marker due to short length of the fabric ply is called as end bits. Remember it is not possible that you would get all rolls which length is multiple of marker length.

In an article, Roger Thomas of Methods Apparel Consultancy defined end bit as a piece of fabric that is longer than the length required to lay up one complete size.

Example: Suppose you got a …

If you think of an apparel product - whether you make one or buy one, you need to know its size. A garment size is named as Small (S), Medium (M), Large (L), Extra Large (XL) or Size 38, 40, 42, 44 etc.

A size chart is a document where a set of measurements of garments for various point-of-measures (POM) are listed against all sizes.

Sometimes we need to convert the size chart from one system to another system. For that correct size conversion chart is useful.

Every clothing brand follows a certain size chart and many of them have published their size guide/size chart online in their web-stores. You can find a brand wise size chart for specific products. Even most of those web-stores provide how to measure guide for apparel shoppers.

In this post, I have shared 9 resources with screenshots (website of apparel brands and tutorial sites). These websites/brands are randomly chosen. Check those resources for further reading and understanding size charts. For your study, you can look into …

A document that contains a sketch of the garment design and garment construction details is called specification sheet or spec sheet or simply garment spec. A designer makes the spec sheet to communicate design detailing and how the garment to be constructed. A spec sheet includes measurements of point of measures (POM) of the apparel product/design.

A defective garment The formal answer is - a garment piece that does not meet the customer requirement is a defective garment. A defective garment can be defined another way that a garment which has unacceptable defects or flaws is a defective piece. A defect might be related to specs (variation of measurement), related to raw material quality (fabric and trims used in the garment), shade variation or stitching defects, construction defects or performance defects.

Sometimes you may need list of garment manufacturers in a particular city in India. It may be for job search, for internship, may be for understanding business process or may be for other business purpose. I know there is no such free database on the Internet. Secondly, buyers look for their potential vendors and apparel manufacturers to source apparel from India. A comprehensive list of garment manufacturers and exports in India will be very helpful.

So I made this list and included as many companies as possible (will be updated with more company names in future). I have collected these names from my old database, from various magazines and from websites.

In this list Top 10 garment exporters in India are included. Some companies have multiple factories and factories are located in different locations. To know more about company and factory address visit website of the company. Many companies don't have a website yet. In that case, by searching company name in Google you will mo…