Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) in partnership with Lectra Technologies India Private Limited recently opened the first of its kind Industry 4.0 Experience Center for the apparel sector at Apparel House, Gurugram. Here, industry players would get to have a first-hand experience on how technology interventions in their operations from product development to manufacture planning would help them digitally transform their businesses, enabling them to be future ready.
The Industry 4.0 Experience Center was inaugurated with the a formal Ribbon Cutting ceremony performed by HKL Magu, Chairman, Apparel Export Promotion Council; BT Nagesh, MD, Lectra India and Rakesh Vaid, Sr. Vice Chairman, ATDC in the presence of other senior members in the apparel exporter community like Lalit Thukral, Vice Chairman, IGFA and Dr. Darlie Koshy, Director General & CEO, ATDC. At this occasion, a partnership Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was also signed between AEPC and Lectra Technologies India Pvt. Ltd.
The welcome speech was given by HKL Magu, Chairman – AEPC on the importance of apparel sector adopting to Industry 4.0. “We would like to thank Lectra for giving their support in setting up this experience center here. It will help our garment exporters to learn and upgrade themselves in terms of technologies and software as our competitor countries like China, Bangladesh and Vietnam are far ahead than us. So, we need experts like Lectra – Thought Leader in Industry 4.0 solutions, who are educating and providing industry players, whether small, large or medium scale, the solutions for improving their productivity and saving fabrics. The garment manufacturers must come to the experience center with their challenges, perform operations, see the results for themselves and then invest in the technology. This will ease out the doubt that they have before making a transformation and investment in the technology,” said Magu, while speaking during the inaugural ceremony.
This speech was followed by introduction to the Industry 4.0 compliant software suite for apparel sector and the demo of each of the software solution by Rajeev Sharma; Pre-sales Consultant for Lectra – PD & Manufacturing Solutions. During his presentation, he spoke about the solutions Lectra is offering and the present scenario and challenges of Indian garment industry and how Lectra could help industry in overcoming them. He also shared some case studies where factories have improved their efficiency by 40-50 percent with Lectra’s Industry 4.0 solution offerings. Lectra- A thought leader in Industry 4.0, is a company committed to crafting premium technologies that facilitate the digital transformation of fashion industry for the last 50 years, empowering brands and manufacturers from design to production.
The AEPC-Lectra experience center has been opened at 7th floor of Apparel House. The access to the center is complimentary from AEPC, and will be having technology consultants available on prior appointments from AEPC where industry representative (Apparel Exporter) who are interested in adopting to Industry 4.0 can go through the suite of Industry 4.0 solution offerings (Virtual garment creation and visualization, pattern making and 3D prototyping, advance marker making solutions etc.). All demos and test runs will be done without any charges to it. “There are more than 8,000 medium and small scale exporters who can’t afford such software. So, it will be an advantage for them to come and witness the benefits of this Industry 4.0 connected solutions at the experience centre and see how it can help them in saving cost by reducing the fabric usage and improving their productivity as this is the main area they can work on to give competition to other countries having price advantage over us. I’ll encourage all AEPC members to visit sometime here with your creative teams. Everything related to CAD, pattern making and others software of Lectra’s Industry 4.0 concept is available here,” said Rakesh Vaid.
The ceremony was attended by leading export houses representatives from Delhi NCR including Shahi Exports, Orient Craft, Radnik Exports, Pee-Empro, Pearl Global, Neetee Clothing, Matrix Clothing and many others.
With Industry 4.0, a new range of possibilities is opening up to companies. Its concepts and digital tools bring new value creation with cost control models based on synchronized, flexible and fast—design, product development, collection management, manufacturing and retaining— processes. Industry 4.0 is a great opportunity for customers to differentiate their offer and better meet consumer expectations, with original products, designed and manufactured in an optimized way, sold at the right price and delivered as quickly as possible. Industry 4.0 is not based on definitive turnkey solutions.
While speaking on the side-lines of the event, BT Nagesh, MD, Lectra India said, “The Experience Centre manifested through a suite of industry 4.0 software solution offering would assist industry players to have a first-hand experience on how technology intervention in their operations would help them digitally transform their businesses enabling them to be future ready. Here they can see live demo of Industry 4.0 compliant solutions offered by Lectra, so that anyone who wants to invest in technology can experience and understand it completely before taking the purchase decision. Customers can bring their data that would include techpacks, product samples, patterns, markers, fabric etc., to have them run on these software solutions and compare it with their traditional way methods, then take the investment decision. Starting this experience center is the first step. The plan is to see how we can implement and deploy this, at the same time making this successful. Once successful, I am sure AEPC would start replicating it.”
Details of Industry 4.0 compliant software suite powered by Lectra
Kaledo Print: From palette creation to the preparation of print specifications. It supports designers for the key steps of the print design process; Kaledo Knit: It accelerates key steps of the knit development process such as structure development, colour palette creation and yarn management. Kaledo Weave: From basic weave to technical stripes and plaids, it supports designers for the key steps of woven textile design, Create colour palettes, combine yarn sequences and weave patterns to create realistic weave simulations development and production teams; Kaledo Style: Simple and effective apparel specific tools cut down the time needed to create new styles and carry over bestsellers; Modaris 3D Expert: For pattern-making and grading with Expert technology (Dependencies); Diamino Pro: For the interactive and automatic marker making solution; Diamino Expert: For interactive and automatic marker nesting of matched, plain fabrics and fabric with motifs; Optiplan: For automatic planning of production orders processed in batch mode
