Lectra Technologies India Private Limited and Apparel Export Promotional Council (AEPC) came together and organised a seminar recently in Gurgaon, India.
The focus of the seminar was on how Industry 4.0 would help apparel manufacturers digitally transform their business to face the dynamic demands of an uncertain future.
The invite-only seminar welcomed about 50 industry professionals including Rakesh Vaid, Vice Chairman, ATDC; Chandrima Chatterjee, Advisor, AEPC; B.T. Nagesh, MD, Lectra India; Suraj Niranjan, Marketing Head, Lectra India; Rajeev Sharma, Solution Consultant, and other team members of Lectra.
Commenting on the significance of Industry 4.0, Suraj Niranjan, said “Trends like mass customisation, mass production, made to measure, made to order, etc., are taking over the market. In such a scenario, manufacturers need to be flexible in terms of production. Technologies like cloud, AI can make it possible for the manufacturers to achieve this. Industry 4.0 solution brings in new level of collaboration and connection across the entire value chain right from planning, developing, sourcing to all the way till the consumers.”
Rajeev further briefed how Lectra Industry 4.0 solution has all the capabilities to help the manufacturers deal with the challenges that are hindering the production efficiency and can help manufacturers save money, time and materials.
He averred, “Factories are producing about 1,000 samples a season which is huge. Few challenges associated with this are time involved, which affects the time to market and cost involved in product development and approval of these samples.”
A live demonstration of the software at the seminar made it clear on how the solution brings about connectivity and collaboration in the entire supply chain. “In Lectra, everything is connected, which means that any changes made in the measurement chart will be automatically reflected in the patterns so that consistency is maintained, providing improved accuracy and reducing the time,” said Rajeev.
Everything became more clear when Kamlesh Katariya, Director, Peppermint Clothing gave a presentation on how his company overcame challenges after investing in Lectra solution. Peppermint is a high fashion brand for girls and their garment construction required dealing with different fabrics and trims. The company wanted to invest in a technology that would be able to handle all kinds of fabrics and trims and will reduce the manpower dependency.
It initially countered some of its challenges with the help of Lectra spreader; looking at the success ratio that it created in the company, Peppermint planned to invest in other solutions of Lectra too. “The benefit that we got from Lectra spreader was that it was possible to lay all kinds of fabrics faster, and obtain longer lay length along with reduced manpower and cost,” commented Kamlesh.
Later, the company also invested in Lectra’s cutting solutions. “The results were high precision cutting; we have seen big change in our manufacturing unit after the technology implementation. There is an increase in accuracy rate; speed of the work load that was earlier spread into 7 pages has now been reduced to 3 tables.”
With this, Lectra also announced the opening of its experience centre for the potential customers who are willing to invest in the technology. The manufacturers can come with their challenges, perform operations, see the results for themselves and then invest in the technology. This will ease out the doubt that the manufacturers have before making a transformation and investment in the technology.
