Automation in Apparel Production

Apparel manufacturing is labor intensive manufacturing and involves highly skilled labours to complete complex tasks required to make a garment. Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes. Human intervention is reduced by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions — and embodying those predeterminations in machines.

Apparel production processes can be divided into two functions; handling of material and joining of fabric components. In garment manufacturing, significant time and labor are spent in material handling, such as lifting, moving, mounting, re-positioning, and re-orientating of cut or semi-finished fabric components. Considering quality assurance in seam productions, it is critical to handle those with a precise and gentle treatment in an economic and efficient way. Second function is sewing, which has to follow certain contour to perform this task. The automation in apparel production can compose of any of these functions alone or may combine both of them.

The automated handling of textile cutting parts for an automated assembly has been a subject of relevant research for decades. In the 1970s and, to a higher degree, in the 1980s, matters of sewing automation were at the center of international ready-made technological research attention, which was expedited with equal fervor in three important economic zones. No absolute breakthrough was achieved, which is the reason for the much of the garment industry still using cost-efficient manual labor instead of relying on automated processes in the manufacture of garments and similar products.

In the Global Apparel Industry, which employs over 80 million people worldwide, Sewing continues to be the most labour-intensive production process. The industries have historically been slow in terms of their adoption of new robotics and automation technologies. So called “sewbots” were first developed in the 1980s, but were largely disregarded by the industries due to the diversity of materials and processes involved, and due to the relative cost advantages of sourcing production from developing countries with low labour costs. This outsourcing of production from 2000 to 2015 caused a sharp drop in employment in the industries in Europe and the United States, by 42 per cent and 66 per cent respectively. While there has been an increase in the sales of robots in the industries in some countries in recent years, these have by far been exceeded by sales of robots to the automotive and electronics industries.