Using WiaTag to drive the apparel production efficiency

Today’s case-study is a vivid example of how the production facility uses Gurtam solutions to drive its efficiency. Apparel manufacturer in Sri Lanka needed to scale up its operations and optimize the planning system of production and transport departments. KLOUDIP company did great again while working on this project. Read the article to learn more.

When it comes to apparel production, we think of AliExpress flogging millions of locally-made garments for the rest of the world. Probably, it is true to the mass market. But in case of high-quality clothing manufacturing, Sri Lanka is among the industry leaders.

The challenge

One of the biggest apparel manufacturers in Sri Lanka wants to get daily data on the exact number of employees going to work that day. The challenge is that buses are shuttling between hundreds of staff residences in the vicinities of plants located in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India. The number of workers at each plant varies from 300 to 3,000. So, the project is quite an ambitious, to say the least. It is due to the amount of information to be processed and properly structured. Still – challenge accepted as always with KLOUDIP though! 

The major objectives are:

• To plan day-to-day operations and meet strict deadlines. The planning team gets to know how many people are going to work the next shift and consequently the actual amount of work they can perform. 
• To address personnel shortages. In the case when the workforce is not enough to fulfill the plan, they can call in additional staff living close enough and willing to work extra hours.
• To optimize daily routes and allocation of buses to districts. The transport department determines how many passengers there are on each bus and what are the most and the least popular stopping points. Now they can combine several routes, reconfigure the existing ones or replace the bus for a higher capacity one. 

The approach

KLOUDIP picked up a smaller plant with 300 workers to carry out the project’s proof of concept.To find out the number of people on the bus, they handed an NFC tag to each worker. 

The shuttle buses were equipped with NFC-enabled mobile devices with WiaTag or specialized NFC-readers connected to GPS trackers. When boarding and getting off the bus, the passengers scan their NFC tags so that WiaTag or a hardware-reader passed their presence and location data to Wialon.

The production planning team gets the info in easy-to-grasp passenger reports one hour before the working shift starts. Basing on the data, they create or adjust the schedule and the amount of work to be done during the shift. Not enough staff at the moment? Time to call for extra people. Not a single worker is missed, the production deadlines are all safe, and the equipment is not idling. As simple as that! But let’s distract from the production section.

The transport department knows the exact time and location where a particular worker boarded and got-off the shuttle bus. 

The total number of passengers also counts for each transport. Now the route optimization is a piece of cake – just determine the most popular and crowded stopping points, arrange them in the right order so that the workers could come to the pickup point closest to their homes (NimBus would be useful here for sure) and voila – enhanced routes are ready! A single vehicle picks up as many people as possible in the shortest possible time.

But what else can the managers do?

• change the bus type according to its boarding capacity;
• change the number of buses on the route;
• change the route if there is an emergency situation (road repair or car accident).

We are sure you can come up with your own ideas.

The result

The client was delighted with the trial. Currently, their software development team is working with KLOUDIP to integrate Wialon with their production planning software tool using SDK. The entire planning system of all plants in three countries is expected to get going soon. It will bring higher performance standards and greater economic benefits.

On top of that, the client’s human resources department thought that Wialon would be of considerable value when calculating the staff attendance. Using WiaTag together with Wialon passenger module, it is easy to estimate the average time the workers spend on the road (traveling to and from work). Having this information at hand, the company’s decision-makers can make up their minds on providing hostel facilities to the workers who live too far from the plant.

Want to dive in more details on the hardware used or tools and settings? Write us at marketing@gurtam.com or leave your comments after the article, and we’ll put you with KLOUDIP itself.