The artificial intelligence and tablets deployed at the largest European
production facility of German businesswear maker Hugo Boss may be
astounding, but it’s the new ways in which humans and machines are
interacting that is perhaps most noteworthy.
“The interesting thing about technology is that it has made us human
again,” Joachim Hensch, managing director at Hugo Boss Textile Industries
Ltd, said in Amsterdam. He oversees the factory in Izmir, one of the four
own-production sites of Hugo Boss in Europe. Of these, Izmir is by far the
largest with around 4,000 employees.
The plant is part of a broader transformation that is taking of the
fashion industry, where production has to react more flexibly to consumer
demand. Joachim Hensch likes to talk about how he started his career as a
tailor for individual customers and quickly learned that the fashion
industry worked differently than he imagined. The era of mass-produced
clothing in the 90s to early 2000s was characterized by consumers following
a brand and buying it. However, the emergence of new technologies such as
social media is increasingly reversing this concept. Customers can now
contact brands directly via social platforms like Instagram or Twitter.
Conference in Amsterdam about how he started this career | FashionUnited
“I still want to participate in the brand’s story but I would like to be
seen as a single customer. This changes the whole concept of production,
the whole concept of following trends,” Hensch explained during his
presentation at the Innovate Textile & Apparel conference in Amsterdam.
Cheaper is no longer enough
The current sourcing practice of merely finding ever-cheaper suppliers
to increase profit margins won’t work anymore. Hensch expects the demand
for man-made, tailored clothing to rise, while mass production of garments
will need to become faster as well as more flexible. The complexity of
production will increase as a result, but technology can help to cope with
time, material and quality issues.
“I don’t see that everyone will go into lights-out factories and
robotize everything, but there will be these two worlds,” he said.
The apparel industry still relies heavily on sewing done by humans, a
process that hasn’t yet been automated; brands often outsource large parts
of production, relying on external cheap labor instead of the more
expensive alternative of advanced technology. Hugo Boss’
65,000-square-metre Izmir factory isn’t foregoing manual sewing, instead
it’s reimagining the ways humans and machines interact.
The factory produces as many as 900,000 suits annually, as well as two
million shirts and 550,000 pieces of women’s apparel, according to the
company website. The plant has also started to deliver single-piece orders
to pilot stores in Asia, according to Hensch.
“In Izmir, we will become a platform for products, services, and
knowledge, a marketplace for what is needed. It will be very different in
the layout, how we manage processes and how we train people.”
A smart factory with virtual learning devices
A fluid and flexible organization needs flat hierarchies in which
managers and employees abandon thinking in departments or silos, Hensch
said. Instead, they need to think in tasks. The new form of organising the
shop floor may be the most articulate expression of his ideas.
While factory workers are generally assigned a single task throughout
any given day or week, employees in Izmir must be able to switch between
multiple duties and work with varying pieces such as suits, dresses,
trousers and shirts. Between shifts, workers have to clean up workplaces
and unplug machines. When it was first implemented, the process would take
40 minutes, whereas now it’s cut down to only five or ten. The flexible
shifts enable faster adaptation to fluctuations in demand for the numerous
product groups that are made at the plant.
The faster pace of switching tasks could trigger more mistakes, however
– a problem Hugo Boss tries to mitigate through collecting data from its
3,500 machines and 4,000 workers. Over 1,600 tablets are used on the shop
floor, allowing mistakes to be immediately flagged to the colleague who
worked on the previous step where the error was made in the production
line, reducing the number of follow-up mistakes. By noticing and acting on
the mistake the worker can choose to rehearse the task with the help of a
mixed reality game that was developed for the factory.
Over 1,000 operations have been taught with the help of “virtual dojo”.
Exploring new ways for people to learn is crucial, said Hensch, as the
speed and quantity at which new skills have to be acquired is increasing.
Eradicating mistakes with Big data
And the use of technology in preventing mistakes goes even deeper –
allowing in some cases for them to be avoided before they even take place.
Using pasta data, algorithms learn to predict when employees will likely
make their next mistake. They may then have to be retrained or forgo the
task completely based on their past record.
Artificial intelligence has even learned to anticipate when employees
might leave the company, allowing Hugo Boss to hire and train people for a
job before the departure. Machine data can also predict when maintenance
will be needed, therefore helping to reduce downtime and cost.
Video (Englisch): Joachim Hensch shares the transformation to a
Smart Factory at TEDxTalk
“I am interested in the connection between human and machine,” said
Hensch. “Machine data is like music. I am looking for the music of machines
and bringing this in context with the people who are working with the
machines.”
After understanding the ‘tune’ of pattern cutters – which means being
able to predict when they need their next maintenance check – it’s still
harder to collect data for sewing machines, said Hensch. The density of
their combined metal structures makes it hard for computers to record
information.
The ultimate goal of the smart factory is to build a sort of digital
twin of the traditional factory that can replicate everything the other
does. Then Hugo Boss could make sense of data to the extent that it can
predict what will happen in the future, explains Hensch: “It is a beautiful
moment when you are beginning to understand what will happen in your
factory or organization in the next week and in the coming months.”
Picture: Joachim Hensch speaks at the Innovate & Textile Apparel
Conference in Amsterdam | FashionUnited
Pictures: Izmir Factory | courtesy of Hugo Boss
