Optimisation of Apparel Manufacturing Resource Allocation Using a Generic Optimised Table-Planning Model

Abstract

Many small and medium-sized apparel manufacturers are employing traditional manual methods and computerised fabric-cutting systems for the fabric-spreading and cutting operations. This paper introduces a generic optimised table-planning (GOTP) model to minimise the spreading and cutting resources of fabric-cutting departments for the apparel manufacturing process. The proposed GOTP model consists of an AutoModule, aManualModule and a BalanceModule to handle three types of manufacturing setup, namely manual, computerised and manual–computerised systems. Three sets of production data reflecting the different characteristics of the nature of production involving small, medium-sized and large production orders are captured to validate the performance of the proposed model. A comparison of the results in industrial practice, and the GOTP model before and after applying the BalanceModule is also presented.