Optimisation of Apparel Manufacturing Resource Allocation Using a Generic Optimised Table-Planning Model

Many small and medium-sized apparel manufacturers are employing traditional manual methods and computerised fabric-cutting systems for the fabric-spreading and cutting operations. This paper introduces a generic optimised table-planning (GOTP) model to minimise the spreading and cutting resources of fabric-cutting departments for the apparel manufacturing process. The proposed GOTP model consists of an AutoModule, a ManualModule and a BalanceModule to handle three types of manufacturing setup, namely manual, computerised and manual-computerised systems. Three sets of production data reflecting the different characteristics of the nature of production involving small, medium-sized and large production orders are captured to validate the performance of the proposed model. A comparison of the results in industrial practice, and the GOTP model before and after applying the BalanceModule is also presented.