Customised shoes are a perfect fit for Europe

“DOROTHY took off her old shoes and tried on the ruby ones, which fitted her as well as if they had been made for her,” wrote Frank Baum in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And it is that approach, customisation of shoes, which is being taken by a consortium of innovative companies in an EC-funded attempt to strengthen competition in the European shoe manufacturing market in the face of globalisation and the advent of new technologies.

There is growing competitive pressure in the shoe market from developing countries. Dorothy, a project led by a Research Institute at SUPSI (University of Applied Science of Southern Switzerland), intends to enhance the ability to compete in this globalised market place in terms of added value.

The mission of the project is to “design customer-driven shoes everywhere, and manufacture them intelligently anywhere”: Customers, anywhere in the world, can step into a shop and co-design their own EU-style shoe, which will be manufactured in a factory that could be in a variety of nations, and designed with Dorothy tools. Paolo Pedrazzoli graduated in mechanical engineering 12 years ago and has worked at the university since 2006. He participates in many nationally-funded and EU-funded projects and is looking for other retail ideas at the Institute CIMSI (Computer Integrated Manufacturing for Sustainable Innovation) Centre of SUPSI, located in Lugano-Manno.

“We’re addressing shoes at the moment, but it can be extended to other things in the manufacturing sector,” he says. Clearly choices must be made carefully on a cost, supply and demand basis. Buyers of shoes, or, say, lingerie may be prepared to pay 20 per cent more for a customised item than for a quality item they could buy off the shelves.

“We must look at making enough shoes to make it economically viable, but it is a matter of technology and organisation, not just scale,” says Pedrazzoli. “It may sound strange but woodworking faces the same problem as shoemaking; furniture is expensive to make and to buy, so it faces similar challenges.”

The concept of Mass Customisation (MC), he says, emerged in the late 1980s and can be defined as “producing goods and services to meet an individual customer’s needs with near mass-production efficiency.” In general, MC is seen as reducing the trade-off between variety and productivity, thanks to new manufacturing technologies and management strategies.

“When we started, not many other people were working on the topic, and they were mainly interested in the ‘customer satisfaction/experience’ side of MC, and not in the problems related with the definition of an adequate flexible supply chain and with the needed adaptation of the manufacturing system itself,” he says. “Indeed, companies still fail to profit from MC because there is no common strategy and appropriate supply chain.

“MC in footwear is a business model that is really good for European manufacturing. It adds value to the shoe and the customer is willing to pay a price-premium for this added value. And adding value to the product will strengthen Europe’s ability to compete against developing countries, as a mere cost-based competition is not compatible with the goal of maintaining the community’s social and sustainability standards.”

He adds: “The MC paradigm pushes companies to think in a different way and consider the consumer as an integral part of the supply chain: at the beginning and not at the end, like in mass production.”

When Pedrazzoli and others started the 5.5million euro Dorothy project, they aimed to show to companies willing to introduce the MC business model, how the supply chain and manufacturing activities are also subject to change. “And how to cope with that change so that MC is profitable,” he adds. “Our objective was to make companies understand MC and to profit from it.

“Dorothy was meant to develop design tools for customer-driven shoes, and design tools for the manufacturing system meant to produce those shoes; as the shoe manufacturer partners in Dorothy are now introducing MC products, then we can say we have been successful.”

The SUPSI institute responsible for Dorothy, ICIMSI, has researchers and engineers with much experience in technology transfer and the application of innovative technologies in industry. It has become a sturdy partner in national and European projects, and its main concern is to serve small and medium enterprises by doing applied research.

Much scanning of feet went into the process of designing Dorothy, Pedrazzoli says. During a mass foot scanning campaign, 10,676 feet were scanned with advanced optical scanners. All the collected data was checked and most significant foot dimensions were extracted, stored in a database and finally analysed according to age and gender, size and the country where the shoes would be produced. Statistical findings offered valuable information for designing best-fitting shoes, laying the basis for development of design tools for customised shoes.

Dorothy’s Shoe Customisation Module (SCM) consists of software tools that gather shoe basic design data, as well as customers’ data, wishes and needs. The SCM transforms this information into data for the actual shoe production. Starting from the basic shoe design (the potential design options available to the customer), the SCM allows the customer to modify the shoe aesthetically and also to identify a set of customer-required performance levels with which the shoe will have to comply.

This process is supported by a 3-D interface for selecting and customising the product features. Once the aesthetic and the performances are defined, the SCM allows customers to try on the shoe in augmented reality, enhancing the product perception and preference fitting. Finally, the module allows determining the best fitting last (last = basic tool for shoe production, the form on which the shoe is assembled) based on the customer’s feet measurements.

Then there is the demographic characterisation module, which gives the number of lasts needed by the

manufacturing system for a given population.

The Performance Indicator Calculation (PIC) calculates the Performance Indicators Cost and Time for every customer product variant, considering the needed resources and specific production configuration (ie, manufacturing, assembly and logistics). Thus, the cost and time values provided by PIC are based on the current situation at the production site and therefore are as accurate as possible. PIC links the related product components and production processes to every customer product variant, empowering the cost analysis of mass customised shoes.

The Factory Layout Planner (FLP) is a multi-client-server application that supports collaborative factory layout planning also on a multi-touch table meant to make the planning activity easy. Planners at different remote sites can collaborate at the same time on the same layout using the client application which can run on standard desktop PCs as well as on innovative multi-touch devices, whose libraries have been developed in the project as well. This tool supports the phases of configuration and reconfiguration of production plants meant to manufacture the customised shoes.

Crucially, it allows easy placing and connecting of machines and operators on 3D layouts by simply dragging the available elements from the provided visual catalogue and positioning them in the layout.

To help the user to better organise its layout according to the available spaces, FLP can import the plan of the building that will host the real production plant.

Moreover, FLP enables a “what if” analysis of the system performances using a discrete events simulation engine.

As for its business model, Dorothy fosters a networked, integrated and customer-driven shoe manufacturing paradigm to replace the linear and conventional sequencing of processes of the shoe manufacturing industry, addressing the transition to a customer-centred production method. The business model becomes a concrete set of procedures, know-how and skills.

Pedrazzoli says his aim for the future is to continue to develop new methodologies and related tools to make MC easier to implement. “But we also intend to further promote MC, not only with companies but also with consumers, as customer reticence is still a problem.

“Furthermore, we are investigating the positive influence that MC has on sustainability indexes [sustainability being the optimal intersection of three sets of solutions coping with environmental, social and economical constraints, the three pillars of sustainability].

“Mass production is still claiming a large amount of energy and, unfortunately, not all the products made are also sold - an intrinsic problem of the ‘push’ production.

“The experience of the footwear sector shows us, for example, that a considerable amount of shoes are unsold at the end of each season with a considerable waste of energy and CO2 having been used to produce products that are not sold.

“If the MC paradigm is applied, then only products that are already sold are produced, and there is no waste of energy,” says Pedrazzoli.

“Approximate calculations show that the energy saved by implementing MC is not negligible. A ‘pull approach’ not only makes sense for the consumer but also for the sustainability of our world.”

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Published: Wednesday, 26th October 2011