I came across this page while searching for SMED applications in sewing lines. I’d highly appreciate anyone sharing their experience, how-to and do’s and don’ts?

I’m familiar with some of your products and I can see where you’re going with this. I don’t think this is insurmountable but considering the size of your operation, I’d urge you to contact America’s 21st. I think a limited roll out for test purposes is well worth exploring. Btw, the average production lot size of the largest manufacturer in the world (Zara) is only 300-500 units.

Our management firmly believes that lean manufacturing requires a fixed product where you can define time for each operation and arrange the flows accordingly.

However, most of our customers are Fashion leaders, meaning they don’t have large quantities. Sometimes orders are as small as 500 units. So before the production flow starts, it has already ended, which makes the entire engineering process inefficient.

Due to recent cost increases in labor, fabrics and well pretty much everything, we are looking into the concept once again.

Like to get some feed back and see if Lean Manufacturing can also be applied to sewing lines that are making frequent changes to styles and etc.

In most cases, the wb curtain can be purchased already assembled to spec and on a roll from a supplier. So, the need to create that subassembly is already built into the cost of materials. That leaves the wb self, the belt loop carriers, the hooks/eyes, label affixing, interior buttonhole, button attaching and felling the curtain steps.

The beltloops would typically be a subassembly because it requires a dedicated setup. In my shop, I have one blindstitch machine that setup with folder to make the loops. Then, I re-purpose that machine by moving it to another location after I’m done batching the loops.

For one-offs, I sew one continuous strip (1 yd) w/ double-faced fusible inserted into the folder. When it’s done, I take it to the clamshell press for fusing and then cut it apart into individual lengths after it has cooled. A template is affixed to the table edge to ensure consistent lengths. For multiple units, I roll the narrow strip onto a cardboard insert and mount it onto a strip feeder over the machine head, run it under the needle and back out onto another insert.

The loops subassembly, fusing and cutting is usually done before I pull the cut units into bundles. My focus is typically setting up each machine with the needed supplies for that round of production.

When I move to (sit down) the sng ndl machine pre-made loops, labels and hooks/eyes are in bins. The wb curtain is on a roll over the machine head, making it easy to insert it when needed or roll back out of the way when not needed.

I set the self fabric, folding up the pleats and inserting the prepared loops at appropriate intervals. Then I set the wb curtain to the self, cutting it off the roll as I approach the required length. The label is set to the curtain and the hook/eye are set with pliers before stitching closed the ends, trimming and turning.

Since I don’t have a bar tacker (nor do I like them on tailored pants) I use the sng ndl to tack the tops of the loops to the waistband. On some styles, the loops are inserted into the wb curtain, wrapping to the interior of the pant for a clean finish – they’re still tacked on the interior edge while the curtain is flat, though.

The bundle then moves to the buttonholer for its buttonhole (batching not required if standing). And, then the button attaching point is marked before progressing to the button attaching machine where the buttons are stored in bins (batching not required if standing). After all this is done, it moves to the blindstitch machine to fell the wb curtain (again, batching not required if standing).

I recently made about 20 handbags and several pairs of pants. I could only batch within colorways. Subassemblies were the straps, shell, and lining for the handbags and the inseam pockets on the pants. But I put a drawstring in the pants as I sewed the casing, which was the last step. Was that a subassembly or not?

On both I batch ironed in that I sewed a bunch of seams, pressed them, sewed more, etc. like Marguerite did because it would have been too hard to do it after the items were completed and they wouldn’t have looked as good.

Thank you, Kathleen, for defending the needle/thread changing hassle to Eric (maybe this could be your next lesson with him! LOL).

I continually fight the batch/one-piece production. I work mostly with straight pieces, and with some styles if I don’t iron them when everything is still straight (usually before the finishing step), then ironing takes way too long. So I do batch ironing, and then batch that last step.

I’m not sure any process can get totally, 100% lean. There are always subassemblies, there just are. But, with the lean model in mind, any manufacturer can become more efficient. I think it’s the commitment to batch assembly that’s the stumbling block.

Marguerite

Until we get our cutting room to the same level as sewing, we’re forced to do a ton of sub-assemblies. Basically all long pants, some shorts, and some cropped pants are done as sub-assemblies. With, say, style 5009 we’ve got 96 individuals SKUs. To avoid having to inventory all that, we’ll make up sub-assemblies consisting of incomplete pant shells that will have trim attached and be hemmed to length as orders come in.

We batch some operations that require very little time and are themselves subassemblies. Waistbands are a good example. The total time allotment for a waistband is 42 seconds – the time required to move a single piece at a time from a serger to the finishing station is longer than the time required to pick them up and put them down in batches. They are unique in that there is only one cut piece and only one sewing operation done. I need to do some timings on a part of the operation that might be improved upon. Next time I do a batch of them, I’ll see if we can remove some of the batching.

Once we bite the bullet and get a good auto-cutting solution in house, the only inventory we should be forced to carry is that which is needed to keep our staff working through the slow summer months when we have excess capacity. And, even that I hope to be able to solve by finding people who’d like to have the summers off and only work during the school year.

(Along those lines, I discovered a way to batch orders into our Optitex marker software. I could theoretically write some code that would take import a list of pieces required to fill orders for the day from our order management system and then automatically generate the required markers, by color, that would then feed it to an auto-cutting station where it would first encounter a human being as they loaded up the appropriate fabric rolls. *That* would be cool.)