When conducting the assessment phase of the project, we identified significant gaps to potential in the following 3 areas:

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Quality Compliance (%)

Lead Time (h)

Cost per garment (£)

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The 3 measures were linked by one common theme - a lack of quality standards and in-built quality processes. The variation in quality between operators meant that 18% of final garments had to be reworked. This added significantly to the overall lead time and the additional correction time and material scrappage was a large input to garment cost. 

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Additionally, by working in large batch sizes, products would not flow through the system in short intervals but instead would wait up to 1 day to proceed. This not only increased the lead time, but meant batches (of hundreds) were scrapped as defects were only identified at the subsequent process stage.

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Together, we identified there were much smarter ways of working. First of all, we conducted a work-study to identify the processing time and steps required for each garment type. We then identified bottlenecks and balanced the workload. Re-designing the lines by product group meant we could achieve a vast reduction in batch size and items could easily be passed between operators using a hanging system. 

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Revised quality standards were introduced and trained to all employees; templates, stencils and fixtures were used to ensure repeatability and build quality into processes. The results include a compressed lead time, reduced cost and improvement in quality.