Estimation of the allowances for shrinkage, scrap in cutting, and defects in the materials pose challenges in planning quantity of fabric for production control and management. In addition, the garment business in general is a low margin competitive business, the fashion business tend to be high variety, change dynamically – and with relatively long lead time for fabric production, estimating the amount of fabric required often becomes an important factor deciding the business profitability. Therefore, most companies have implemented a series of existing ordinary processes for achieving accurate fabric estimation. However, a flood of obsolete and overrun fabric is commonly found in the warehouse and storages in most companies. Against this background of overrun, a high percentage of ord...[ Read more ]

Estimation of the allowances for shrinkage, scrap in cutting, and defects in the materials pose challenges in planning quantity of fabric for production control and management. In addition, the garment business in general is a low margin competitive business, the fashion business tend to be high variety, change dynamically – and with relatively long lead time for fabric production, estimating the amount of fabric required often becomes an important factor deciding the business profitability. Therefore, most companies have implemented a series of existing ordinary processes for achieving accurate fabric estimation. However, a flood of obsolete and overrun fabric is commonly found in the warehouse and storages in most companies. Against this background of overrun, a high percentage of orders have found actual shortages of fabric to fulfill a customer’s requirement.

This thesis attempts to develop a new methodology to design a fabric planning process to ensure sufficient quantity of garments can be produced on time with low cost and minimum fabric wastage. Though most of the data required to solve the above problems often can be found within the companies, the communication among different functional departments have not been able to take advantage of the wealth of these information and thus, the problems persist. To ensure timely flow of key information between technicians representing the production side and the merchandizing department representing the customer side, business process design is applied to solve the root problem. A step-wise structured business process methodology consisting of five design stages with Axiomatic design concept is developed. Lean process principles and lean process principles and lean information flow ideas are also introduced to the methodology.

Finally, using a real case study, an evaluation of a process design is demonstrated. The approach is further validates with a simulation model. The result shows that the proposed design provides an improved performance of performance of quotation time and accuracy of fabric consumption estimation.