How to Make WIP Report in Garment Production?

In the recent past, I developed one WIP report for one garment factory. The factory is making high fashion dresses for the international market. To make such kind of products factory needs to involve a lot of manpower in hand-repairing process. Inside the repair section, there are multiple sub-processes. Hand-repair, checking of the repaired pieces, alteration of the hand-repaired piece, checking of the altered-hand-repaired pieces.

In such production environment, the factory required process-wise /sub-process wise WIP report data for managing daily production and keeping the cost per garment under control.

Factory keeps a manual record for each piece- who made the hand-repair, at what time the piece was issued to repair-man and when the repair is completed by the repair-man. But from that record, they do not get WIP data at different processes at any moment. 

I need to make one WIP report for them and replace the manual data recording of each piece. While discussing with the manager of the factory, I had experienced and learned new points. I will be sharing it here in this post.

How do you prepare the production in your factory? would you like to share your method of making garment production WIP report? I can understand that you are not making the same kind of products. Still, you might be making WIP report for your product.

The fact is that you can't ignore the WIP report. Whether you want it or not, you need to make it. WIP is the work that you need to finish and WIP is money that lying on the floor. 

Production WIP 

It means the volume of work that is under process in the production processes. If it is sewing line WIP, it means the total number of semi-stitched (unfinished) garments lying in the line. Garment cuttings are loaded but not yet come out from the line. Garment pieces lied inside the line, spread over the workstations of the line.

In an earlier post, calculating WIP level in cutting, sewing and finishing section I have shown WIP calculation formula as:

Cutting WIP = Total cut qty - Total qty sent to sewing,
Sewing Line WIP = Total pieces loaded to the line - total Pieces completed
Finishing room WIP = Total received from sewing - Total pieces packed

Technically above calculation method is correct. But it that method timeline is not defined. Total pieces loaded to the line since when? Is it today or week-to-date or week-to-month loading quantity? If you consider it week-to-date total pieces loading quantity, then at the start of the weel you need to complete al garments and make zero WIP in the line. But that is not possible to clear out the line in every week or in every month.

Then how to measure the WIP in garment production processes? Read the below explanation and formula.

WIP calculation formula 

WIP of a sewing line need to be calculated using the following formula:

Sewing line WIP = (Total garments loaded today + Previous day's balance WIP - Today line output)

You need to record 3 data on the selected date -

1. production loading quantity, 
2. production output quantity, 
3. previous day's WIP quantity (closing balance). 

Same way you can prepare WIP for other sections. Like cutting section WIP, Finishing section WIP.

The production recorders can easily keep previous day's WIP records in their daybook and carry it forward as the opening balance for today. This closing balance carries forward and becomes the opening balance for everyday WIP calculations. 

The physical registers are okay for recording and maintaining day to day data. But not enough for data analysis and information sharing with management. WIP report should be generated automatically and should be available for view at any moment you need it.

WIP Report 

We used the database they have from the real-time production tracking system to get WIP report in Excel Sheet. See the below example of such report.

WIP report template

In the above WIP report, cutting section WIP and sewing section WIP are included. The WIP is showing till-date total production quantity which is optional for the WIP report.

If you have above-listed data in a SQL database, you can fetch data from the database and make production WIP report as you desired using the pivot table.

Note:  Excess WIP on the shop floor at any process is not good for many reasons. Here I have explained 7 ways to reduce WIP from the bottleneck operations.