At outdoor apparel maker Polartec LLC, the difference between warmth and waste is measured in dollars and cents — $516,000, to be exact. Until recently, that’s how much the company spent each year cutting extra fabric out of the seams of coats and other clothing in the end stages of manufacturing.
The Polartec coats are inspected before they ship out the door, and sometimes a seam must be manually resewn, which leads to discarding extra fabric. The process is necessary, but the problem was the company’s inability to understand why it was wasting $516,000 worth of fabric each year in those final-stage activities.
Today, Polartec tracks and analyzes the inspection process using SAP’s Business Objects software. “When something is cut out, we have to key into the system the reason why,” says Dave Alves, Polartec’s director of IT. “We started with four or five reasons. Now we are up to 12, and if one keeps surfacing, we are able to look at it and identify the low-hanging fruit that can be easily fixed.”
Those easy fixes, Alves says, will help the company realize its near-term goal of reducing the cost of wasted fabric from $516,000 per year to about $150,000 per year.