The activities of the Indian clothing industry supplying Western markets have been investigated, with particular reference to identifying where improvements could be made to supply chain management. Focus group discussions, case studies and questionnaire analysis established that long lead-times in pre-production areas were of great concern. However Indian apparel manufacturers were found to be more cost conscious and rather less conscious about the value of time in pre-production areas. It was found that pre-production activities constituted 73% of total manufacturing lead time and have high positive correlation (0.96) with total manufacturing lead time. Preproduction activities in India mainly consist of prototype making and pre-production sample development; of which approval processes were found to have a high correlation (0.63) with pre-production. A significant (more than 50%) time of all activities consist of waiting time, which has positive influence on total lead time (0.86). Improvements to sample approval processes such as streamlining iterations and bottlenecks could eliminate some non-value added activities and reduce total manufacturing lead times by as much as 12 per cent. The average loss of time due to intermittent work interruptions in skill-based activities such as grading ranged from 15% to 24%; this could be saved by prioritising workload distribution to resources. Implementation of critical chain methodology compressed the pre-production time by 40%, resulting overall improvement of lead time by 29%. A skewed distribution of workload on resources in the pre-production chain tended to result in unbalanced planning and inefficiencies. A multi-project Gantt chart when implemented through software could help rationalise the distribution of resources, levelling the workload with better prioritising of activities, thus leading to better management of bottleneck resources.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:629166 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Jana, P. |
| Publisher | Nottingham Trent University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/121/ |
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