When a paint spill ruined Kevin’s workwear, his supervisor wasn’t worried. She knew that Lindström would get Kevin new gear, tailored to his specific needs, within a few days.
Thanks to Nortal that helped us to get our garment manufacturing lead time from weeks down to one day. Please, take a closer look to our story how we managed to build up a solution which helps us but even better helps our customers.
Gone are the days where everybody wore the same dark blue overalls no matter in which factory they worked. Now, even workwear is expected to be unique and tailored to the company’s brand.
For us this trend meant the volumes of purchase orders increased significantly, although the production volume increased modestly. This, in turn, meant a considerable increase in the number of stock keeping units (SKU) and a more complex production planning.
To offer shorter lead times and improve the customer experience, we were setting up a new workwear manufacturing site in Latvia. The factory would follow the production-on-demand principle and had to be able to operate flexibly. It also required capabilities to automatically optimize the production plan and monitor production in detail and from afar.
We also needed this new, lean production process set up in a way that could be duplicated at other production units.
On-demand productionNortal was happy to take on this challenge and – met it, with production processes up and running in when the first orders came in.
As a solution, Nortal crafted us a complete, integrated production planning, execution and tracking solution that manages our production seamlessly. Now, we have a customer-driven process where garments are manufactured only on demand and just-in-time: An order from customer is a signal to start cutting the fabrics.
Once the order arrives, automatic scheduling rules aid production planners by suggesting an optimal production plan for available capacity and several planning constraints. The plan will secure on-time delivery of each and every garment ordered from the factory.
On the shop floor all the garments get labeled with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and every movement is registered in the system for real-time tracking and progress reporting. Everything that happens in the factory – from traceability of the individual garment through production lines and cells to the order fulfillment – can also be monitored also from our HQ in Helsinki.
The data collected from each garment’s RFID-tag let us monitor where in the production process a specific garment is, how much time different parts of the manufacturing take and when the garment should be ready for shipment.
All the different systems supporting the daily business of running the production – product lifecycle management (PLM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), advanced planning and scheduling (APS) and manufacturing execution system (MES) – are interconnected and the information flows automatically.
We used a template-based modular platform approach deployed in cloud. In the future, it’s easy to apply the same system to similar production sites as very little changes and modifications are needed. Maintainability and faster to roll-outs give higher ROI (return of investment).
Based on Lindström’s requirements, we saw that advanced planning and scheduling (APS) was the key component of the production on demand solution. Scheduling is supported by manufacturing execution (MES) that tracks actual production in real time.
The impact of this project has been mind-blowing. Not only has the garment manufacturing lead time improved dramatically, but the factory in Latvia has considerably higher productivity than the clothing industry’s standards. Productivity is way above expectations that we had in the beginning of the project.
Similar operations have been built elsewhere in the world, but for mass production. To build a factory like this for producing small batches is very unique. Without ROB-EX and Nortal we would not be able to run a factory like this.
I’m very happy. I would absolutely recommend others work with Nortal. The factory is performing way above our expectations. We had very tough targets and goals, and we've exceeded them all.
The timeline of the project was on the more challenging end – we only had a few of months to design, implement, test and deploy the solution. And the factory in Latvia was still being built, so there were a lot of unknown factors at play.
Nortal is very proud to have helped Lindström to bring garment manufacturing to the “Industrial IoT” era. With automation and data-driven decision making, Nortals system has helped us to increase profitability and productivity.
Our solution supports flexible and extensible approach to grow with Lindström’s business. We’re happy to see how it has already helped Lindström achieve higher productivity than the industry’s standards.