A study of fabric loss during spreading

Abstract

Fabric is the core of apparel manufacturing. For this concern, many studies have been carried out with the aim to reduce fabric wastage in the production process. Cutting room is a place where a huge amount of fabric loss is generated. Fabric loss in cutting room is mainly caused by two operations - marker making and fabric spreading. Although marker making shares a large portion of material wastage, fabric loss due to spreading is of equal importance for material utilization control. This study focuses on the development of an appropriate method which can be used for the prediction of total fabric loss during spreading in an accurate manner. The use of it could help people to determine and evaluate the efficiency of a particular cutting lay. Through intensive revision, Ng's theoretical model[37, 38] was considered to be the most comprehensive model, was selected as the groundwork through which a more integral and generic new equation was formulated to furnish a high precision way for total fabric loss prediction during spreading. Apart from the factors considered by Ng's model, the new equation was formulated by the incorporation of two adjusting factors. Not only these two factors can make the equation to be better with high integrity and generality, but also they fetched it with high preciseness in the prediction of total fabric loss during spreading. Industrial data was involved for validation and verification of the new equation. To further examine it's practicability and generality, bipolar study was used for such examination, in which two sets of data were collected from two factories producing different kinds of garment (men's shirt and pants) with an immense variation on their style and material used. During the study, real industrial data was compared with those theoretical prediction obtained by the new equation so that the prediction error can be fully revealed. The results proved that the equation is capable of making a precise prediction of total fabric loss with only a trivial range of error (-0.08% to 0.01%) in all samples. Since two cases for verification were selected in a bipolar manner that with notable difference on the products nature, thus, it is believed that the error on predicting total fabric loss for other types of apparel product will also lie within a low level.