A monthly column of technology rambling, rumination and reality

By: Jud Early, Corporate Vice President, Research, [TC]²

November 2003

More notes from the field…

Dark was giving way to light as the 7:03 left the Birmingham New Street Station. At first, the usual scenes viewed from the rails; lots of brick and stone, grimy industrial buildings and streets that were beginning to build with early morning traffic. Traffic passes with oblivion over rusting, riveted steel structures with peeling paint that bridge the railway. Further into the countryside, the notebook computer comes out, and as I begin to convert the mental outline for this article to something tangible, the English countryside presents improving delights to the eye. A few cattle, grazing on fields that have been used since Roman times, and hedgerows grown thick and impenetrable draw boundaries for those who are expected to pass by, not through.

It has been a whirlwind month. Beginning with the Material World trade show in Miami Beach, Florida, followed by a couple of days at home and then travel to Munich, for the Mass Customization and Personalization Conference. After a week at home, I'm off again to Birmingham England for ITMA, the quadrennial textile machinery show. As the train rolls along over smooth rails, gently swaying, I contemplate how to present all the material in just one newsletter.

Flocks of birds, wings white in the early sun, lift in masse from a plowed field. Coventry, Banbury, Oxford, then Reading, we're now only minutes from London's Gatwick airport. Between Oxford and Reading a canal meanders in the same general direction as the rails. Houseboats, from tiny to medium size are tied at points along the canal, providing a floating home for families and perhaps the isolated loner. One's imagination runs free for a minute with visions of how life in such cramped quarters must be. Back to reality, I begin to put words on the screen as the towns of Dorking, Reigate and Red Springs pass by my window.

Material World provided an opportunity to meet some of the Techexchange advertisers for the first time. This contact was much enjoyed. This show is structured around just that, the venue and opportunity to bring together people with a need, and suppliers with goods and services that hope to meet such needs. The show enjoyed good traffic and it appeared that all planned booth space was occupied. The show organizers, far from being faceless, were on the floor, making tours of all aisles at least twice daily. According to Tim Von Gal, a principle in the show's producer, attendance was meeting expectation, and the quality of visitor was high.

The big news is the spring show to be held May 18-20 in cooperation with SPESA, the equipment supplier association, and AAFA and will include a large section devoted to technology solutions. The spring show was characterized as "intimate", meaning "not wide aisles". A floor plan for the Miami Beach Convention Center shows booths closely spaced, and with only a small amount of floor space devoted to overflow. It should be a good show. 2004 also marks the beginning of a triennial rotation in which SPESA will have a larger presence, and will rotate every third year with IMB in Cologne, and JIAM in Japan, while the Material World Show changes to a once-a-year event.

The show also featured seminars on global issues, such as sourcing and logistics, as well as a session on information technology with roundtable with discussion among industry notables. Hot topics include RFID, collaboration, solutions to improve visibility in the supply chain, and full package issues. All in all, it was a good mid-year show, and with an improving economy, sets the stage for what promises to be a true international show for equipment as well as materials.

MCPC 2003, the international Mass Customization and Personalization Conference was hosted by the Technical University of Munich. Conference organizers were Ralf Reichwald and Frank Piller of TUM along with Mitchell Tseng of Hong Kong Technical University. With a truly international attendee list, the strong interest in mass customization was highly evidenced. Interest in mass customization in the US is lagging Europe, but there were exceptions. More on that later.

Following the opening keynote addresses, the first day was largely academic in presentation and content. Research into many related topics was presented in concurrent tracks. I moved from track to track to allow auditing topics of the greatest interest, and all sessions proved to be informative. Topics included research into process variety, and how to offer differentiating products while also limiting the construction variations to a manageable degree. "Virtual build to order", another academic topic discussed the concept of a "floating decoupling point" where the supplier also builds finished goods inventory and delivery leadtime depends on position of the customized order in the pipeline. Research centered on how long the pipeline needed to be to satisfy custom orders while allowing inventoried items to be completed on time. Another presentation focused on changing the specification of a product as it passes along the pipeline, allowing customization at the last critical moment before committing to a specific final configuration. And finally, a presentation on mass customization and sustainability. One concept is a network of small factories, with information networked, and providing distributed work flow and balance among the members of the network. Day one concluded with a roundtable of academic discussion with Paul Zipkin of Duke University, USA, Bart McCarthy, University of Nottingham, UK, Rebecca Duray, University of Colorado, USA, Bernd Skiera, J.W. Goerth University, Germany, Michael Zaeh TUM, Germany, and Mitchell Tseng, Hong Kong Technical University. A truly global group of researchers.

The last item before closing was the announcement of the formation of the IIMCP. This body, the International Institute for Mass Customization and Personalization granted charter member status to all attendees at this conference. Future conferences will be produced on a global scale, but can, and should be, tailored to local needs and issues. Bringing together so many interested universities and practitioners should provide a forum to disseminate continuing research, as well as allow reportage of practitioners who have success stories in this field.

Day two was opened by Frank Piller, with Bill Bass of Lands End being the opening keynote. Bill reported remarkable numbers that are being generated through their customization offers, and credited technology partner, Archetype with bringing the potential of mass customization to a reality with self-measure techniques. Between one hundred and two hundred thousand people visit the Lands End site every day, with more than one third of sales coming through the Internet. Remarking on My Virtual Model, Bill stated that it is the most popular part of the site, and has been since 1998. I'll not post here the sales improvement over time, or the average order improvement due to custom. Just let it be known that according to Lands End figures, this is a highly profitable part of their business, and serves the greater purpose of binding the customer to the supplier through an improved level of customer service, and emotional satisfaction with the product.

The second keynote of the day by Jack Aaronson stressed the impact of personalization. This does not mean only a monogrammed initial on a shirt pocket, but related strongly to knowing and understanding your customer and more than just meeting a need, anticipating that need through excellent customer relationship management, and offering a true personalization of the experience, as well as the product.

Following the keynotes, business seminars were offered to the attendees. I attended sessions that offered both relevant content and substance. I'll not attempt to detail all here, but will expand on certain topics in future newsletters or will post an article in the Techexchange library covering topics from the following speakers: Louise Guay of My Virtual Model, Jean-Louis Heyd, of Lectra, Andreas Seidl of Human Solutions, and a group from Hong Kong Technical University including Michael Yee, Wendy Wai, Mavis Ng, Rosita Au, and introduced by Mitchell Tseng, and Michael Byvort of shirts.net.

Closing out the second day were presentations by Yvonne Heiman of Gerber Technologies and Mike Fralix of [TC]². Yvonne spoke of mass customization as a paradigm shift, and Mike debunked some of the myths of mass customization.

A formal dinner for the three hundred or so attendees was held at the Old Munich City Hall. A five hundred year old structure, it is now used for ceremonial purposes, and has a barrel vaulted, coffered wooden ceiling that spans a room that is almost the size of a football field, with no supports interrupting the open floor area. We were welcomed by a speech from the Lord Mayor of Munich, who remained with the group as dinner was presented. Food was excellent, and was presented in such a beautiful setting and with such grace that we were awed. Following dinner, and before dessert was served, a special performance by members of a dance troupe told a story of a fair maiden courted by thirteen suitors, all dressed in traditional costumes of five hundred years ago, with each trying to out-do the others through acrobatic feats that included hand walking, tumbling, leaping, doing aerial somersaults and throwing ones-self onto the floor, and bouncing back upright. It was a very entertaining and unique dance that ended with the last surviving acrobat winning the hand of the fair maiden. As I commented to friends at the table, I believe that was the first fair maiden, live, and in costume, that I have ever seen, complete with tall pointed hat, veil, and flowing colorful gown. Uh oh, I've wandered a bit from technology, haven't I?

ITMA 2003 held in Birmingham England is a huge fair of textile machinery, related equipment, and software for managing such businesses. It is of grand scale, with huge facilities housing all types of machine. Despite the large halls and giant venue, some exhibits were placed in large tents. Huge looms, Knitting machines of all types, spinning and preparation equipment, as well as dyeing and finishing are represented. My focus for the show was Digital Printing and related technologies. Due to the size of the show, and the limited time in which to cover such a broad range of technology, I prepared a list of twenty seven digital print suppliers and thirty vendors of allied equipment. Since this letter is already running long, I will reserve most detail for a future issue, but want to share with you some general trends.

First, there is more focus on larger, faster digital printing machines for textiles. DuPont, along with Ichinosi, showed the Artistri machine.

A leader in advancing the technology, the machine has two printing beams with dual print carriages traversing the fabric width. The dual beam construction allows higher speeds, or higher resolution at a lower speed.

Leggit & Platt showed a machine that has enjoyed success in the graphics arts industry, a wide machine, with capacity up to 3.5 meters in width, and can print on sheet goods as well as anything up to seven inches thick.

On display was bedding and household textile that was colorful and with acceptable hand, and a wooden cabinet door, with a printed inset panel, illustrating the potential uses for such a machine with seven inches of vertical head clearance. It utilizes only UV curable inks at this time, but with an on-board UV lamp, the ink is cured as it is laid down, with final cure being done with an oven that is resident in the printer.

The next step up in size and price was the Reggiani DReAM machine. (No, that's not a typo!) This machine, with an almost one million dollar price tag, is the product of collaboration between Reggiani,(fabric handling), Scitex Vision, Ltd, (the print mechanism) and Ciba, ( dye technology).

It is rated at 300 square meters per hour, but to ensure good quality is recommended to be used in double pass mode, with output of approximately 150 square meters per hour. Massively built, this machine is being re-engineered to reduce the weight of some of its superstructure. In a running demonstration, the machine produced high quality graphics and output at a level that can be considered the best
available at this time. It has seven print heads on six different beams, all mounted to a massive bridge structure to obtain the rated speeds.

A machine that shares the dual beam design, but which utilizes Mimaki print mechanisms on a wide sticky belt was shown by DP Innovations. I cannot report on any aspect of the machine except for what I visually observed. Despite three attempts over two days to speak with someone in the booth, there was no one who was conversant on the subject machine. I'll try to get more info and report with a future article.

Stork showed the power of parallel, lower throughput machines by disclosing a service center in Asia in which they are involved. With twenty-four printers, they are able to achieve acceptable volume of throughput, but most interestingly, illustrated the real benefit of digital print technology. A customer who serves a major retailer in New York ordered fifty yards each of forty different samples of print fabric to produce sample garments for a market test. Expecting to drop about half from the line after initial sales, they were surprised to find that the

customer, instead of dropping styles, retained all, and increased the ordered yardage, resulting in a total order of forty thousand yards of digitally printed fabric. This would seem to be above the tipping point for screen print economies, but due to the variety of designs, and the ability to deliver almost on demand, screen printing was by-passed. A most impressive story. Not altogether new, Seiren has used this model in Japan for years, but this is a first in delivering market tested products in modest volume.

There is much, much more to report, but I'll close with my personal technology advancement award. (Ta Daa!)

Mimaki has addressed the issue of blocked nozzle on drop-on-demand machines. As we all know, an undetected blocked nozzle, can result in fabric and ink loss, due to loss of a fine unprinted row of dots across the fabric width. To date, this problem has remained unresolved. In an innovative and relatively simple manner, Mimaki has added a ribbon of clear film that advances with the fabric feed, immediately to the right of the fabric web. As the print head completes its path across the fabric, it continues printing onto the sacrificial strip of clear film. Below the film is a vision system, which looks through the film, spotting any missing track at the first traverse in which it occurs. The current mode of operation is to detect and stop printing before any loss of consumable occurs. In the future, with more intelligent firmware, the printer should be able to reverse the fabric feed to allow exposure to a nozzle that is not blocked and to fill in the missing row of dots. Of course this would result in a lower throughput, but would avoid the interruption of printing in the middle of a length of fabric. If the nozzle could not be unblocked, the machine would call for service. This simple approach is the first practical attempt that I have seen for this very difficult problem.

So, a tip of the Technology Corner hat to the design team who came up with this solution!

Stay tuned for more. I'll work on the full summary of digital printing from ITMA and will send another newsletter advising where it can be found.

Next Month: A technology grab bag

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