Application of Industrial Engineering in Garment Industry

Application of Industrial Engineering in Garment Industry

Abdullah Al Mamun

Assistant Manager-IE

Fareast Knitting & Dyeing Industrial ltd

E-mail: ie.mamun@fareastknit.com

Industrial engineers determine the most effective ways for an organization to use the basic factors of production - people, machines, materials, information, and energy - to make or process a product or produce a service. They are the bridge between management goals and operational performance. They are more concerned with increasing productivity through the management of people, methods of business organization, and technology than are engineers in other specialties, who generally work more with products or processes.

It is important to know why one should set up an IE department in garment factory. I have taken help of two questions to explain this topic in detail. Two questions are -

1.                  What is the application of Industrial Engineering in apparel industry?

2.                  How Industrial Engineering concepts are used by apparel manufacturers?

What is the application of Industrial Engineering in apparel industry?

Industrial Engineering concepts are used in garment manufacturing to fulfill the following purposes – 

    Ø  Monitoring production floor and having better control over the production floor.

    Ø  Improving processes and improving method of working to increase factory's overall performance and standardized garment manufacturing processes.

Overall application of Industrial engineering can be explained better by describing common tasks of the IE department. Common tasks of an IE department are as following but not limited to these

    Ø  Work measurement of sewing operations, cutting room jobs and finishing jobs

    Ø  Setting standard time for sewing operations and manual operations

    Ø  Style analysis and conducting research and development (R&D) of the styles 

    Ø  Improving method of work and design workstation 

    Ø  Production planning and factory capacity determination

    Ø  Work aids development

    Ø  Work station designing and machine layout planning

    Ø  Labor cost estimation

    Ø  Performance measuring of workers 

    Ø  Training of workers (sewing operators)

    Ø  Designing incentive scheme and calculating incentive for sewing operators

    Ø  Setting line production target of the sewing lines and chasing production from line supervisors and operators

    Ø  Application of lean tools

How Industrial Engineering Concepts are used by apparel manufacturers?

Factories those are using IE techniques mostly have a complete IE set up (department). An IE department consists of an IE managers (in-charge) and Industrial Engineers and juniors engineers. The strength of IE team widely varies based on the maturity level of the department and on the focus of application of Industrial Engineering. Without having enough team members, an IE department cannot work effectively.

Industrial Engineers are utilized in the following ways but not limited to those -

Factories apply all or few of the above listed functions to 

    Ø  Assist line supervisors by preparing resource requirement plan (machines and equipment and manpower), line setting and line balancing etc. 

    Ø  Assist production managers in target planning and production planning.   

    Ø  Help merchandiser and marketing personnel by providing labor cost and production lead time.

    Ø  Help HR department by providing operator performance level, and help in operator recruitment.

    Ø  Prepare MIS reports and show management team product status on daily basis and alert management team if their attention is needed.

    Ø  Set up standards operating procedures for new tasks, new process required for ever changing fashion products.

More than the regular jobs, IEs are also responsible for thinking of continuous process improvement. Initiation of new projects and implementation of the project that has been undertaken, showing the improvement opportunity within the factory to management team. Engineers are involved in performance improvement tasks of the cutting department and finishing department.

Companies those have limited manpower in IE team, only involves engineers for routine jobs like, making operation bulletin, thread consumption, preparing daily production reports etc.