Kathleen wrote: …. this is the item that has me perplexed, the matter of an operator carrying cut pieces around…there are many parts, perhaps 50 or more. It’s not a situation where you could create an inventory of interchangeable subassemblies which are added as an input to a shell because flaps etc must be cut from the same ply and matched (stripes etc) to its companion front. I’m thinking small baskets or something but workstations won’t necessarily have a place to lay these like a regular plant (which has a side table where bundles are laid). It is all very interesting and complex.

This is the kind of problem that gets into my head and won’t leave. (Which I love.) So I wonder: what are the possibilities of going vertical? If there’s not room for all of the input parts on the table, then what are the opportunities for vertical storage? And I also ponder: if what you are creating is a garment, then a dressform or mannequin (pinnable) is one logical way to keep everything together and organized. That solution seems extreme, but what about some kind of deconstructed/modified/cubist version of such? The goals being: make it mobile and keep it lightweight (=put on wheels; mostly wireform but some pinnable areas); help keep parts from being wrinkled to save pressing & maintain grain & quality (reduce abrasion, etc); keep parts together logically (in whatever way that makes most sense for the operators); make it so that the op. can quickly see if parts are missing/wrong/bad; include small baskets/drawers/file folders/hooks/etc so smaller items/parts are included in a well-organized manner.

Artists, architects, museum curators deal with interesting storage issues and have a few interesting tools and things they use (and lots of boring and uninteresting ones).

Perhaps this was tried waaay back when and found to be a horrible idea thought up by some amateur. But I’m always willing to throw out a bad idea just in case it sparks a good one. And what the heck — it is April Fool’s. If it’s a horrible idea, I’ll claim it was an April Fool’s joke.
I’m *such* a process person. This is a great discussion.

It’s also quite interesting to me (a home sewer) that even in industry the term “sewing time” is used so terribly imprecisely and misleading-ly. I would think (as an engineer) that “Total unit production time” would be used. (And even that is imprecise, since as Kathleen points out it doesn’t really speak to ‘paused’ or on-hold time [resting/bottlenecks/etc.]) With my overly-literal engineering mind, I would hear “sewing time” and assume that it meant *only* exactly that: the time the sewing machine was being run by an operator. Even as ‘just’ a home sewer, I know that the time I actually have the pedal-to-the-metal is a small percentage of the total time & effort it takes to complete a garment.

I guess if you called this series “How to Make Your *Process* Faster,” Kathleen, fewer people would have read it. (And if you’d called it “What Makes your Processes so durn slow?” even fewer still would have read it!) Calling it “How to Sew Faster” was much wiser.
(And it only takes a home sewer *one* of those “Two Hour!” patterns to learn that “Two Hours!” means that a marketing person has had their non-sewing hands involved in writing on that pattern envelope.)

Does anyone know if there is a lean mfg. for home sewers guide?

Not as far as I know. But, years ago when we did ours at home, I know that Amy tended to sew up a single garment from start to finish as the orders came in. We structured the cut piece bundles in order to minimize the amount of time that Amy had to do anything other than sewing (e.g. switching attachments, changing thread, etc).

In fact, our lean system now looks a whole lot more like our old home sewing system than the batch-mode system we implemented in between.

what do you guess it would take one stitcher at a pod set up for that jacket? An hour? Is that with subassemblies being fed into the pod? AM 21st would know. I remember them saying that they would generally set up multiple pods for something this complex, for the subassemblies.

Context
I was a relatively late adopter of lean sewing as we think of it based on the issue of sub-assemblies owing in part (I think) to the commonly noted arrogance of those specializing in more complex single needle assembly characterized by suits etc. I’m coming around but the matter of sub assemblies is a difficult one. I’ve had several spirited discussions with America’s 21st about it; they haven’t implemented pods with products this complex. That said, the only way I can see this working is to have three pods side by side. One for sub assemblies, one for shell/main construction and the last for finishing (pressing, buttons, tagging etc). An operator would have to start in the sub assemblies pod to construct linings, flaps etc and then move over the the other to construct the shell and then to the last for finishing.

Of this process, this is the item that has me perplexed, the matter of an operator carrying cut pieces around…there are many parts, perhaps 50 or more. It’s not a situation where you could create an inventory of interchangeable subassemblies which are added as an input to a shell because flaps etc must be cut from the same ply and matched (stripes etc) to its companion front. I’m thinking small baskets or something but workstations won’t necessarily have a place to lay these like a regular plant (which has a side table where bundles are laid). It is all very interesting and complex.

I don’t think the goal of an hour’s construction time (or possibly less) under lean conditions to be untenable but it’ll take some seriously applied industrial engineering, space and a lot of equipment to get there…

So, if one would normally estimate an operation would take 10 seconds being batched (and not accounting for handling time), as was mentioned in the forum, perhaps 20 seconds in a lean setting would be a good estimate? I just did some quick calculations, and that seems about right for my current project, although I think I can improve on that, as I’m not an exprienced machine operator. That’s why I roughly doubled the 28 minutes for the jacket to an hour in a lean setting.

Marguerite