Standardized buttonhole piece sizes and button hole position

The buttonhole pieces could be cut, marked and sewed in larger amounts beforehand, and then mark in the product card which size to use. Anyhow, the buttonholes would be more sensible to sew according to order, since there can be 6 different yarn colors.

However, again the number of pieces would be quite numerous with 5 different fabrics,

so many lockers would be required to storage them. There are more different sizes for women because waist height options are low, regular or high. Men can only choose a low or regular waist height.

6.2 Optimal production plan and manufacturing strategy The production is outsourced, which reduces control over processes, so very dependable relations with outsourced manufacturing facility are required. Own manufacturing and packing facilities would minimize the lead-times and ensure high quality, as distant factories are more difficult to monitor and control to optimize production flow and ensure quality. The goal for production is to advance simplicity and reduce complexity in order to achieve shorter and less varying lead-times. In addition, logistic planning is very important and require enhancement to become more efficient, since now the deliveries from factory to final customer can vary from approximately 5 days up to two weeks, including final quality inspection for the finished jeans.

At the moment, it is difficult to measure and define exact times for the different stages of the production, since now at the beginning, there are interruptions and more concentration required to get the details of each unique product to match the order.

Figure 17 next page) presents the information and material flow from the purchase to the delivery. However, this is an optimal estimation, and there have been lots of delays in delivery-times because of sudden and unpredicted problems that have occurred in nearly every stage of the production and delivery processes.

Figure 17. Information and material flow from purchase to delivery.

6.2.1 Organizing the manufacturing

The manufacturing processes of the jeans are cutting, sewing, washing and finishing.

The batches of customized made-to-measure jeans require sorting between the different stages as well as time for quality inspections before wash and after finishing. The manufacturing processes and times are presented figure 18 (next page), and described in detail later on in this chapter. Investing in automated cutter would shorten the cutting time considerately. This could reduce cutting time of one pair of jeans to 3 minutes from 10-25 minutes by hand. Standardizing the sizes of inner pockets would reduce cutting time, since this would enable cutting the inner pockets in large quantities in advance,

Customer Order Status NOMO HQ Factory Time

Purchased

and then combining the right size and color with cut denim pieces of the jeans before sewing. There are possibilities to standardize also other parts of the jeans, but there should not be compromises with fit. The amount of different fabrics will increase in the future, which will extend the complexity. The goal would be that the number of quality inspections checks could be reduced, and quality would be good at first time, but at the moment, every pair of jeans is inspected.

Figure 18. Organizing of manufacturing operations and estimated time for each operation (in China).

One option in the future could be that the orders are continuously automatically processed after purchase. This would mean that an individual order would go automatically through the system, and patterns and product instruction cards for each order would be created, and then the order would be transferred to the manufacturing queue at the factory. However, this kind of system would require similar kind of organizing as weekly batches. When manufacturing customized made-to-measure jeans, it is not reasonable to produce one piece at a time, because it is not efficient to change the yarn colors to the sewing machines often. In addition, washing of single pieces is not efficient use of washing machines, and this would have also bigger impact to the environment than washing full loads, since the industrial washing machines are developed for large quantities. However, high volumes could be processed with this type of continuous order processing, as similar orders would be picked from the queue to be produced together. This would require monitoring that a single different order would not have to queue for a long time, and wait for more similar orders.

Cutting

At the moment, there are no automated cutters in use, and everything is hand-cut with electric rotary cutters. Printing of patterns is very time and patterns paper consuming. In addition, it takes about 10-25 minutes to cut and mark fabrics for one pair of jeans by

Cutting Sewing Quality check 1 Washing & effects Finishing Quality check 2 Organizing patterns

Continuous development of patterns, systems and processes Continuous design and sourcing of new materials

Organizing according

Estimated total time of production 14 - 21 days

Checking according

hand. After cutting, each piece of pattern is marked with an order number to avoid mix-ups, and rolled together with patterns and product card. This would take only about 3 minutes with laser cutter, so in the future automated laser cutting machine is required to handle larger volumes. Latest Gerber Made-to-Measure program does not easily enable to layout many patterns into one file, and the biggest problem concern the difficulties in marking the real order number in each piece of pattern with the program, so that the cutter would know which piece belongs to which jeans.

The Made-to-Measure software is designed primarily for one-piece production of made-to-measure garments. This is why each denim fabric pattern and inner pocket patterns have to be in separate individual files, which make the process more complex since files have to organized according to fabrics so that they can be printed out as one layout, and then cut from one fabric at the time. On the other hand, this system does not allow planning layout so that fabric consumption could be optimized and minimized, like in traditional mass-production and pattern layout planning. The fusible interlinings for waistbands and fly pieces are cut separately according to denim fabric patterns. NOMO Jeans have also bias tape in waistband and fly pieces, and these bias tapes are cut separately beforehand from the same fabrics that are used in inner pockets.