by [TC]²
Inter-Enterprise Technologies for a Textile Industry Electronic Marketplace
Authors
Ken Washington
Suzanne Rountree
Sandia National Laboratories
Contributors
Sandia National Laboratories
Debra Browitt
Leon Chapman
Charlene Harlan
Craig Parr
Marge Peterson
Eunice Young
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Chip Hatfield
Ernie Vosti
Carolyn Wimple
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Joe Fasel
Jim Ostic
Suzanne Watters
[TC]²
Jim Lovejoy
Graphic Design and Illustration
Wanda Mar
Michael Townsend
Editor
This report was prepared by Sandia National Laboratories as part
of the DAMA Project. For copies of this document, contact
Jim Lovejoy,
DAMA Project Director,
at Textile/Clothing Technology Corp.
211 Gregson Drive
Cary, NC 27511
Phone: 919-380-2184
email: jlovejo@tc2.com
Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia
Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department
of Energy under Contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.
Background
The goal of the AMTEXTM Partnership is to strengthen the competitiveness
of the U.S. Integrated Textile Complex (U.S. ITC), which consists of
the fiber, textile, apparel, and retail sectors. AMTEX is a collaborative
research and development program that includes industry, the Department
of Energy (DOE) national laboratories, other federal agencies, and universities.
The Demand Activated Manufacturing Architecture (DAMA) project is the
flagship AMTEX project designed to help U.S. businesses be more competitive
through the use of DAMA-developed information technologies and their
integration with available commercial offerings. The vision of DAMA
is to identify and demonstrate, by the year 2000, ways for the U.S.
ITC to reduce time in its product manufacturing pipelines by 50%. The
ITC manufacturing pipelines represent the combined production processes
required to fabricate a single product, like a shirt, from start to
finish.
DAMA is studying specific pipelines to identify changes that will strengthen
their competitiveness and in turn improve the competitiveness of textile
industry supply chains. These supply chains are partnerships of companies
that collaborate in the manufacture and shipment of multiple products.
The following key AMTEX principles guide DAMA developments
and make them unique relative to currently available offerings.
•The AMTEX Partnership must access and integrate all the nation's
research capabilities to address the needs of the U.S. ITC, including
relevant universities, federal laboratories, and industrial research
institutions.
•The proper point of interface between government and industry is through industry-integrating organizations, rather than through specific companies.
•The industry will make the results of AMTEX-sponsored R&D projects available to benefit all industrial operations within the U.S. ITC.
Even though the DAMA project is unique, existing tools and technologies play a key role in achieving the DAMA vision. This is especially true in the electronic marketplace and supply chain analysis areas, where significant commercial development of Internet and advanced planning and scheduling technologies has occurred over the past few years. However, these developments alone are not sufficient to enable the U.S. ITC to achieve the DAMA vision. Unlike existing tools and technologies, DAMA-developed tools are being guided by an industry-wide consortium of business decision makers. Moreover, the unique structure of AMTEX and DAMA enables industry's needs to be identified using rigorous business process modeling and simulation-based analysis techniques. These needs have never before been identified for an entire industry.
Business Analyses and Opportunities
Understanding Textile Industry Needs Using Pipeline Analyses
DAMA partners collaborate to identify and demonstrate improvements
that can eliminate excess inventory, reduce lead times, and provide
more value to the consumer. DAMA researchers have developed and applied
a rigorous yet generic pipeline analysis methodology to accomplish this
work. The need for such rigor is explained by the complexity and magnitude
of the textile industry, as depicted below.
Magnitude of textile industry complexity.
This figure shows the complexity of the textile industry. Thousands of retailers and manufacturers must work together to manage the flow of millions of products and a substantial quantity of information through highly complex supply chains in order to meet consumer demand. This is a daunting task, especially given the uncertainty associated with representing consumer demand. The first step toward meeting this challenge is to understand the opportunities that exist for improvement. Together, the sectors within the textile industry lose over $45 billion in revenue. The figure below illustrates the kinds of waste responsible for this loss.
Sources of loss in the U.S. ITC pipelines.
DAMA is identifying opportunities for saving costs by
analyzing specific product pipelines in detail. These in-depth analyses
are only possible because people who manage the information and products
that flow through the pipeline interact closely with DAMA research scientists
as they apply the DAMA pipeline-analysis methodology to this challenge.
The results of these pipeline analyses have confirmed the need for new
tools that address inter-enterprise supply chain analysis and coordination.
Management at this scale and complexity cannot be accomplished through
the use of company-focused decision support tools, which are necessarily
limited in scope. Studies conducted under the DAMA Enterprise Modeling
and Simulation (EM&S) task reveal that inter-enterprise focused
tools, also called cooperative business management tools, are needed
to achieve true synchronization of the myriad manufacturing, transportation,
and business processes needed to manufacture textile goods and move
them through the supply chain to the consumer. The figure below which
shows a nylon parka pipeline (taken from an EM&S study), illustrates
the complexity of a typical U.S. ITC product pipeline.
Process step map for men's nylon Supplex®parka.
Studies like this one identify company interactions, shared
data needs, and opportunities for improvement that can be exploited
using DAMA-developed inter-enterprise cooperative business tools. The
following two DAMA project reports describe the processes used to perform
these detailed pipeline analyses and their results:
DAMA-G-6-97, Pipeline Analysis Guide for the U.S. Integrated Textile
Complex.
DAMA-G-22-96, Enterprise Simulation Analysis of the Nylon
Jacket Pipeline.
Data Analysis and Modeling Environment
Another result of the pipeline analysis work was the discovery that
computer-based tools alone will not eliminate textile pipeline problems.
To achieve the goals of DAMA, business practices also have to change.
Thus the Data Analysis and Modeling Environment (DAME) tool is being
developed to help the U.S. ITC identify, define, and structure the data
needed to support cooperative business practices. By establishing commonly
understood linkages between business practices and data, DAME will generate
common business models and the supporting data definitions needed to
make collaborative decisions. A first-level view of the business process
models depicted in DAME for the apparel sector is shown below.
Business process models in DAME for the apparel sector.
This figure illustrates the major apparel processes, their
data inflows, data outflows, controls, and other important interconnections.
Each data element is consistently defined in a glossary that includes
references to electronic data interchange definitions where appropriate.
Additional detail for each major process can be accessed by "drilling
down" within each box shown in the figure. DAME models are being
built for the apparel, textile, and fiber manufacturing sectors; the
retail sector; and for transportation logistics.
The models and data definitions are published over the Internet on a
dynamic Web site to ensure a common understanding throughout the industry.
Business decision makers anywhere within the U.S. ITC can access these
models to facilitate collaborations with their strategic partners. DAME
also supports the other DAMA-developed cooperative decision tools, such
as the Supply Chain Integration Program (SCIP) described below, by providing
consistent definitions for business processes and relevant data elements
to be shared and analyzed across U.S. ITC supply chains.
Textile Industry Electronic Marketplace
To support its vision to reduce U.S. ITC product pipeline times
by 50%, DAMA set a goal to establish a textile industry electronic marketplace
where producers, suppliers, and retailers can efficiently communicate
and exchange information. This goal is based on the premise that more
innovative and widespread use of information technology will result
in increased U.S. ITC competitiveness in the global marketplace. Individual
product pipeline analysis results have confirmed that such an electronic
marketplace is needed and that its development is an appropriate focus
for DAMA. In particular, DAMA is defining an inter-enterprise architecture
for this electronic marketplace. DAMA is also identifying, developing,
and integrating inter- and intra-company infrastructure and tools that
fit within the architecture. Specifically, new collaborative inter-enterprise
decision support tools are needed. These tools, known as Cooperative
Business Management (CBM) practices, emphasize collaboration and encourage
cooperative decisions among business partners. Because DAMA is a partnership
that engages both the technical resources of the DOE national laboratories
and the expertise of business decision makers from the U.S. ITC, it
is in a unique position to build the enabling infrastructure for these
tools, to assess and guide their development through the prototype stage,
and to confirm their merits in pilot situations using real business
data.
TEXNET: A Textile Industry Data-Sharing Network
The foundation of the textile industry electronic marketplace is
a robust, secure, and flexible data-sharing network. Recent commercial
electronic networking advancements enable businesses to begin tapping
into the immense potential of various forms of electronic business-to-business
connectivity. Much of this connectivity initially occurred over private
value-added networks. More recently, the widespread availability and
low cost of the Internet has motivated its use for connecting companies
that want to do business in an electronic marketplace. However, using
the Internet to provide the foundation connectivity for the DAMA electronic
marketplace poses some unique challenges, many of them related to data
security. TEXNET was developed in the DAMA project to address these
challenges. TEXNET provides a framework for fiber, textile, apparel,
and retail businesses to use decision tools like SCIP collaboratively
in a distributed but secure network environment.
The TEXNET electronic framework will help businesses share confidential
data while using business decision tools over the Internet. TEXNET builds
on Internet standards and protocols, such as World Wide Web technology
and Public Key Cryptography, so that virtually everyone in the U.S.
ITC (anyone with Internet access) will be able to use this secure system.
The security in TEXNET includes four major elements:
•Authentication: you are who you say you are.
TEXNET will authenticate (using proven Internet standards) who is actually
sending and receiving informationguaranteeing that both the sender
and the receiver are the designated participants in the agreement.
•Data integrity: unaltered data. TEXNET uses encryption
to ensure that data have not been altered or corrupted during transfer
over the network.
•Privacy: only the intended recipient can view the data.
Business partners will be able to share agreed-upon data without exposing
their information to unauthorized users.
•Access control: only specified data may be accessed. Requesters
will be granted access to data only if the associated data-sharing agreement
specifies that they have access to the specific data requested.
TEXNET enables multiple partner companies to share data
over the Internet concurrently. The secure data sharing is based on
electronic data-sharing agreements that define what data are shared
with which trading partner. In other words, no matter where a company
is located geographically, it can exchange electronic information securely,
as illustrated below.
Secure data exchange using TEXNET.
Supply Chain Analysis, Forecasting, and Plant Scheduling
Tools
TEXNET provides the infrastructure necessary for using inter-enterprise
decision support tools such as SCIP, a DAMA-developed tool designed
to take advantage of this enabling infrastructure. New analysis, forecasting,
and scheduling tools have also made it possible to design tools like
SCIP that process product- and style-specific demand information. The
key industry advancements applicable to SCIP include new product-specific
forecasting capabilities and company-focused advanced planning and scheduling
(APS) tools. APS tools in particular are beginning to significantly
impact the textile industry. These tools exploit the low-cost availability
of extensive computational power to solve difficult scheduling and planning
problems, which typically involve developing production schedules that
satisfy a complex set of manufacturing and/or transportation constraints.
These tools have so far focused on constraints within a single company
or a small group of companies in an enterprise. The DAMA challenge involves
extending APS concepts to the inter-enterprise level. The SCIP tool
is being developed to meet this challenge.
Supply Chain Integration Program
One of the key opportunities identified by the pipeline analyses was
the use of inter-enterprise supply chain integration technology to help
synchronize production and transportation activities in textile industry
supply chains. SCIP is being developed to extend APS concepts to the
inter-enterprise level. SCIP will help U.S. ITC companies in specific
supply chains make collaborative business decisions by analyzing tradeoffs
among consumer demand, material availability, and resource capacity.
SCIP was developed by DAMA to create a new inter-enterprise supply chain
analysis decision support capability for the U.S. ITC. But DAMA developments
alone cannot produce a tool that meets the needs of the U.S. ITC; thus
SCIP can interface with commercial forecasting tools to analyze the
impact of forecasts relative to supply constraints throughout the entire
supply chain.
DAMA is working with technology companies that are affiliate members
of the project to ensure that these commercial advances are appropriately
leveraged during electronic marketplace development. SCIP is designed
to function within the textile industry electronic marketplace infrastructure
as an effective inter-enterprise tool. Because of the complexity and
scale of the inter-enterprise level, SCIP is being developed to leverage
existing company-focused APS tools when they are used.
SCIP is designed to work where retail demand needs to be synchronized
with manufacturing constraints across multiple companies. Analysis at
this level includes constraints relative to production rates, manufacturing
capacity, shipment times, and available inventory. SCIP will enable
mid- and high-level decision makers in the textile industry to analyze
these constraints from an integrated systems perspective and respond
quickly to changes in a way that benefits all partners in the supply
chain. SCIP manages, at a supply chain level, the interaction of consumer
demand information with supply-related constraint information, as illustrated.
Supply and demand interactions modeled in SCIP.
SCIP was developed using formal object-oriented design
methods. It uses information from the business process models developed
under DAME to solve the demand/constraint problem and provide a "what-if"
simulation capability that enables users to assess the variation of
the solution under uncertainty. Output from SCIP includes schedules,
orders, stockouts, unmet demand, excess capacity needed to meet demand,
and inventory levels as a function of time. With SCIP, decision makers
in the industry can use a computer to examine the impact of their decisions,
thus promoting collaboration and enhancing the likelihood of better
collaborative decisions.
SCIP Architecture and Interface with TEXNET
The figure below illustrates the overall architecture of SCIP, which
is designed to use TEXNET for data sharing.
SCIP architecture.
TEXNET and SCIP developers have successfully demonstrated
how the tools could work together by securely sharing data using TEXNET,
then analyzing supply chain tradeoffs using SCIP. The TEXNET/SCIP demonstration
was a collaborative teaming of three fictional companies in a supply
chain partnership. When the retailer wanted a seasonal promotion, the
promotion demand data were shared using TEXNET (actually pulled from
the remote server during the demonstration) and used within SCIP to
see if the collaborative supply chain partnership could support the
promotion. Next, when the apparel company wanted to supply an additional
retailer, the second retailer shared its product demand data for two
new products using TEXNET, and the apparel company ran SCIP to see if
it could support the additional retailer and still meet its current
commitments within the existing collaborative supply chain partnership.
The SCIP tool was successfully used to analyze the supply chain and
solve any stockout or capacity problems that were identified.
Advanced Planning and Scheduling
SCIP is being developed to integrate with commercial company-focused
APS tools and technologies. Available APS tools would work within the
analysis engine (shown in the SCIP architecture figure above). IBM,
a DAMA research affiliate, is working with the Sandia Laboratories team
to demonstrate this aspect of the SCIP strategy by integrating its Production
Resource Manager (PRM) into the SCIP analysis engine. PRM is a commercially
proven development tool-kit for solving large-scale constraint-based
manufacturing problems. The current SCIP/PRM integration takes a user-generated
supply chain description and constructs the appropriate PRM function
calls to solve the inter-enterprise manufacturing constraint problem.
The resultswhich include production schedules, capacities needed,
stockouts, and unmet demandsare displayed in graphic form.
A SCIP analysis begins with a definition of the supply chain. This includes
identifying the companies in the supply chain and the products they
manufacture and sell that are to be analyzed. Within each company the
products are defined using an input screen.
SCIP product information form.
SCIP is completely flexible in enabling users to include
any number of companies in the supply chain and any number of products
within the product's bill-of-materials stream. This flexibility is needed
to represent the complexity of a U.S. ITC supply chain.
The user specifies the current inventory, safety stock policy, and forecast
method on this input screen. The production time for manufactured products,
the capacity usage of that product, and detailed bill-of-material (BOM)
information for the products must also be specified on separate forms.
This information is provided to SCIP by pressing the "view BOM"
option located near the bottom of the product information form. Currently
SCIP requires the user to provide BOM information manually; however,
a feature is being implemented to enable BOM information to be automatically
imported into SCIP from spreadsheets.
The figure shows the screen for a simple user-defined inter-enterprise
supply chain.
Company relationships in SCIP.
The output from SCIP includes production schedules, capacity
usage, and other manufacturing parameters that companies require for
inter-enterprise collaboration. This output is created when the user
selects the "run" option on the SCIP main menu. This information
could then be used to drive company-focused APS tools.
SCIP uses the PRM engine to generate smooth production schedules that
meet customer demands. A smooth schedule, which is most appropriate
for steady production rates for basic goods, is just one of many user
requirements that SCIP is being developed to meet. Ongoing work will
determine how the production schedule solution can be optimized according
to other users' requirements, such as:
1. just-in-time or make-to-order scheduling for quick, targeted response;
2. production scheduling that minimizes inventory holding; or
3. optimizing safety stock levels to enhance raw material availability.
SCIP Development Toward Commercialization
SCIP development will continue until it can become a commercially
available tool for the entire industry. One of the key developments
under way includes the introduction of variability to reflect uncertainty
in manufacturing constraints, including the implementation of seasonal
production calendars (in units that can accommodate production times
in partial days) and the addition of randomness. Another key area is
the tighter integration of SCIP with TEXNET, including changes to make
SCIP available as a Web application and to demonstrate its capabilities
in an integrated pilot.
An Inter-Enterprise Architecture
The DAMA project's current focus is on developing an inter-enterprise
architecture that will define how DAMA-developed tools and technologies
integrate with each other and with commercial technologies to achieve
DAMA and AMTEX goals. A DAMA committee consisting of industry, university,
and national laboratory personnel is developing this architecture. The
technology affiliate companies in DAMA are expected to play a key role
in planning a pilot demonstration that will be visible to the entire
U.S. ITC. This pilot demonstration will connect DAMA-developed technologies
and results with existing company information and commercial technology,
such as:
•pipeline investigationsto provide a source of data, detailed scenarios of problems that need to be solved, and potential pipeline solutions for improvement;
•DAMEto define the collaborative information to be shared (with common data definitions, format, and structure) and company business processes;
•TEXNETto securely and selectively share information among trading partners;
•SCIPto analyze supply chain tradeoffs, including an interface definition for commercially available company-focused APS tools;
•the National Sourcing Database (NSDB) and other sourcing databasesto look for domestic supplier sources;
•a sourcing simulator that compares sourcing alternatives, such as onshore and offshore suppliers and various types of replenishment strategies;
•network services that provide small and medium enterprises
(SMEs) with access to collaborative tools.
The unique arrangement of DAMA enables individual companies to participate
in piloting activities because risk is managed at acceptable levels.
In these pilots, companies provide real or realistic data and identify
detailed scenarios of supply chain issues requiring solution (e.g.,
improved logistics, support for product promotion, ability to support
new supply chain partners, and identification of domestic suppliers).
By using the integrated inter-enterprise tools developed in DAMA, pilot
companies will experience improvements of real business value.
The DAMA project is collaborating in this effort with many industry
standards associations like the Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Standards
(VICS), American Apparel Manufacturing Association (AAMA) and American
Textile Manufacturers Institute (ATMI).
With the completion of a powerful and convincing demonstration of the impact of these technologies, the realization of the DAMA and AMTEX vision of increased competitiveness in a global marketplace will soon be a reality.
Companies interested in participating in a pilot, commercializing the technologies, or joining the thirty research partners of the DAMA project should contact:
Jim Lovejoy
DAMA Project Director
at
Textile/Clothing Technology Corp.
211 Gregson Drive
Cary, NC 27511
Phone: 919-380-2184
email: jlovejo@tc2.com