• Journal of Appropriate Technology
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.70-81
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• 2019

The garment industry is one of the most labor-intensive manufacturing industries, with its sewing process relying almost entirely on manual labor. Its costs highly depend on the efficiency of this production line and thus is crucial to determine the production rate in real-time for line balancing. However, current production tracking methods are costly and make it difficult for many Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) to implement them. As a result, their reliance on manual counting of finished products is both time consuming and prone to error, leading to high manufacturing costs and inefficiencies. In this paper, a production tracking system that uses the sewing machines' energy consumption data to track and count the total number of sewing tasks completed through Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifiers is proposed. This system was tested on two target sewing tasks, with a resulting maximum classification accuracy of 98.6%; all sewing tasks were detected. In the developing countries, the garment sewing industry is a very important industry, but the use of a lot of capital is very limited, such as applying expensive high technology to solve the above problem. Applied with the appropriate technology, this system is expected to be of great help to the garment industry in developing countries.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.372-378
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• 2015

In labor-intensive enterprise, such as garment factory, assembly line is widely used as a manufacturing process for reducing costs and production time. However, for the sake of the various working capacity of worker, idle or delay may happen and influence the rear processes. If these unforeseeable delay happened continuously, it may influence the whole manufacturing process and a model, which is called limited-cycle model with multiple periods (LCMwMP), is assumed to evaluate the influence risk. In order to minimize the risk, the assignment of the workers is focused on. In this paper, we deal with an assembly line as LCMwMP model when two kinds of workers exist, whose efficiency is assumed to two different groups. We consider an optimization problem for finding an assignment of workers to the line that minimizes total expected risk, which is exchanged to expected cost by reset model of LCMwMP. First, reset model as a simple model of LCMwMP is introduced. Then, some hypotheses of the rules of the optimal worker assignment are proposed and some numerical experiments are researched assuming the processing time as Erlang distribution. Finally, the other rules on other certain conditions are discussed.

• IE interfaces
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.51-64
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• 2008

As apparel manufacturers have increased their outsourcing garment making to cope with the rapid changing market, the information sharing has been the most important factor for the Korean apparel industry. The purpose of this research was to identify the properties and effects of information sharing system between Korean apparel manufactures and contractors. For this study, two apparel manufactures which actually used the information sharing systems were case-studied for the properties and effects of the information sharing system. The results of this study are shown as follows; 1) The companies ("J" and "S"), studied in this paper used sharing information mostly on order, delivery, and accounts within their contractors based on information sharing system. Company "J" turned out to have strong partnership with their contractors and developed more flexible manufacturing system and QR strategy. They shared not only basic transaction information but also quality inspection information and work-in-process information by using information sharing system. 2) The effects of information sharing system were proved as business transaction time reduced more than 60 percent, compared when staffs had to face to face, or use phone or fax to deliver documents. This study was investigated to provide an example which introduces information sharing system objectively and systematically to the apparel industry.

• Journal of the Korea Fashion and Costume Design Association
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.151-162
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• 2013

Studying employees' personality and relationship to their job would help to improve high unemployment and turnover rate in the current Korean fashion and textile industry. Based on personality which is an important influential factor, this research studied types of fashion and textile-related occupations and differences among employees' personalities related to the types. Using disclosed data from Korea Employment Information Service, 27 fashion and textile-related occupations were selected for the final analysis. Ward's Minimum Variance Cluster Analysis, MANOVA, and ANOVA by SAS 9.3 was used to analyze data. First, fashion and textile-related occupations were classified into three groups. Group 1 was mostly consisted of occupations related to manufacturing process of fashion and textile including mechanical technicians. Group 2 included occupations in garment designing and manufacturing. Designers and manufacturers including shoes, bags, and jewelry belong to group 3. Second, after observing differences in personalities among the three groups, group 1 answered that most of the personalities were not important for performance of their duties, group 2 said that only some of them were important, and group 3 regarded most of them as important. Specifically, group 1 considered precision as the most important personality but rest of the personalities not as necessary. It was revealed that personalities in relationship with other personnel such as sociality and leadership were not important. The results in this study will be used for analyzing whether job seekers' desired occupations in fashion field corresponds to their personalities and is expected to become a basic data of students' career counseling for educators.

• Journal of Fashion Business
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.183-199
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• 2015

This study aimed to systematize the apparel vendor work processes and provide useful information to future employees of clothing export units by analyzing the processes of vendors' manufacturing tasks. A survey of 20 apparel vendors servicing mainly U.S. buyers was conducted on employees of overseas business departments working for more than five years. buyers. Based on the results, vendors mainly manufactured cut-and-sew knit products. Regarding the production method, OEM was used more frequently than ODM. Fourteen (70%) companies used the ODM method. This suggests that vendors are expanding their production method from OEM to ODM. In order to summarize the work of each business based on the clothing production process research results, buyers were in charge of planning products and the vendors were in charge of sampling. Production of materials and the approval of material tests were out sourced. Overseas factories of vendors were in charge of bulk (mass) production and garment finishing, as well as packaging and shipping the completed products. Even though the vendors' head offices do not directly produce clothes, they play a pivotal role in ensuring planning and management progress in clothing production. As buyers prefer direct contracts for cost reduction, the vendor additionally performs the role of an agent. Also, with the increase in ODM production ratio, the work area of the vendor is expanding. If Korean clothing exporters improve their global competitiveness by investing in the R&D of materials and design to enhance the ODM method, the development of Korea's clothing and export industry will benefit significantly.