Application of

Computer in Textile
Industry
Md. Sakib-Uz-Zaman
Assistant Professor
Introduction
• Current era is the age of computerization.
• Each industry is getting benefit from automation and ease
provided by computer science.
• Textile sector, a major industry in terms of revenue generation
for a country, has badly neglected all this ease.
• Textile industry is mainly dealing with the design and
production of yarn, cloth and garments.
• The application areas of the computer may be classified
broadly into engineering, business, scientific, and recreational
applications.
• The computers are widely used in the engineering applications
to help both designing and manufacturing industries manage
their processes and information system.
A general textile production
process flow
Introduction
• The role of computer in manufacturing is broadly classified
into two groups, namely design and process control.
• In textile industry, induction of computer and its applications
has revolutionized the manufacturing techniques.
• Product development has become more innovative than ever.
• In addition to this, the time consumption in generating an
idea and then its conversion to the final end product has also
been reduced to a great extent.
• There are several other advantages that the manufacturing
units are getting. Some are explained in the following
sections.
Purposes of Textile Industrial
Application of Computers
• Know the areas of computer application in textile industry and
understand how to work with computer systems in textile
processing and new product development.
• Learn computer fundamentals and programming languages and
necessary tools.
• Learn how to apply computer knowledge such as programming in
textile processes.
• Learn visual programming languages tools to develop user friendly
programs and software.
• Learn Microsoft office spreadsheet tool such as Excel for
consumption, calculations and presentation of results as graphs,
charts etc.
Purposes of Textile Industrial
Application of Computers
• Learn basic of Database Management System such as Mysql, Oracle
including MS Access and learn how to connect databases from
applications.
• Use of commercial and open source software for fiber technology,
spinning, weaving, knitting, coloration technology and textile testing.
• Use of different statistical methods to analyze engineering data.
• Use of different mathematical techniques to solve engineering problems
and use of mathematical packages like MATLAB.
• Use of computer in textile materials and inspection techniques to get
some idea on hardware such as computer interfacing systems and micro-
controllers used in textile machineries.
The overall course objective is to provide the student with the background to
understand and work with computer systems for data acquisition, analysis,
display and control of textile processes.
CAD and CAM
• CAD is the contraction which stands for Computer Aided
Design and CAM is the Computer Aided Manufacturing.
• This term means different things to different people involved
in designing, manufacturing and mechanical engineering.
• CAD or Computer Aided Design has brought a revolution in
the Textile industry.
• The time consuming and cumbersome process of textile
designing has been made easier by CAD.
• Now thoughtful and innovative designs are available to the
textile designers and textile manufacturers at the click of a
mouse.
Application of CAD/CAM in textile
industry
• The textile designs are the original works of the designers.
• CAD helps them to visualize and see their imaginative design
in final form without producing any sample swatch.
• Sometimes, the customers to provide ideas for designing
according to their particular requirement.
• These are in the form of painted artwork or fabric samples
and sometimes film negatives.
• The textile designers, with the help of CAD, convert them into
workable designs.
• For this to be done the sample is scanned with the help of
either scanners or digital cameras and then they are edited to
obtain the final design.
 Application of CAD/CAM in textile
industry
• Computer systems used to design and manufacture products.
• The term CAD/CAM implies that an engineer can use the system both
for designing a product and for controlling manufacturing processes
CAD is broad term used to represent use of computer in designing.
• CAM is term that denotes the computerized control of manufacturing
process.
• Almost all industry sectors are using CAD in their designing
departments.
• CAD can help to draw textile designs for textile industry.
• We should not confuse CAD only with drawings.
• CAD covers many aspects of designing like design calculations, data
analysis and simulations.
• Commonly used software used for CAD are AUTO CAD, MSVISIO,
Smart Draw etc.
CAD in apparel industry
Enterprise Resource Planning
(ERP)
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a software or tool that
brings about effective coordination between the departments
of an organization to direct the process by providing
comparative information and analysis regarding trends and
forecasts.
• It consists of several modules that operate in collaboration
with each other and look after the overall industry.
• It assists in effective management of the supply chain, just-in-
time inventory, and information as well as enterprise logistics
management, effective monitoring and control, accurate
planning and scheduling of orders, better data predictions,
quick response to queries, and online detailed information of
orders.
Enterprise Resource Planning
(ERP)
• Now ERP is widely used in different branches of textile
manufacturing.
• ERP is not only helping in the design (CAD) and manufacturing
(CAM) process of the product but it also looks after the overall
process of the textile industry.
• ERP deals with almost all the departments starting from
procurement, production, distribution, accounting, human
resource, corporate performance and governance, customer
services and sales.
• It also covers the areas of business intelligence, enterprise
assets management, e-commerce and other business related
strategies.
Machine Monitoring
• The machine monitoring module of the ERP for textile
provides the layout of the factory, indicating machines with
interactive graphics, colors, symbols and icons depicting
their status.
• This module aids the managers to monitor the machine
efficiency and its current status (i.e. running or stopped),
stoppages and their causes, order running on a specific
machine, etc.
• Along with this, it also monitors the performance of the
worker operating the machine and performance of the
machine regarding to a particular type of product.
• All these features help in the instant identification of any
problem, which leads to the maximum throughput and
increase the overall productivity.
Report Generation
• As ERP stores all the data in the central database, it allows the user
to generate customized reports.
• These reports give detailed insight of the key performance
indicators.
• This module is very much customizable according to the user
requirements and needs.
• The key factor which users want to highlight, becomes easily
accessible.
• Different types of reports help managers to get the intuition of the
business progress, and to take better decisions.
• These reports also help to develop and reframe the production /
marketing strategies according to the latest changing trends.
• It is also possible to improve customer relationship by undermining
the customer purchase and sale patterns.
 Production Plan
• This module of ERP is somewhat like a plan board, with extensive graphical
interface.
• It integrates with the machine monitoring module and central database, giving
the view of the production plans.
• Its basic or fundamental functionality is to ensure the availability of the raw
material required for the production along with the use of production capacity
at its maximum.
• It can calculate the time needed for an order to complete and then scheduling
the respective order on the relevant and suitable (highly efficient for that
particular order) machine.
• Production orders can be added automatically or manually by the manager
from the marketing module.
• Along with this it also allows the user to define time and quantity of raw
material required for that particular order.
• With the use of this module, scheduling of the production order can be done
on the level of individual steps involved in manufacturing.
• Reliable delivery dates can be communicated with customers as it schedules
the target dates for each production step.
Inventory Management
• Inventory management deals with the management of the
inventory of all the resources and the raw materials like fiber,
yarn, grey fabric, apparel, chemicals and dyes and finished
products.
• It also deals with the work-in-progress (WIP) and production
stocks.
• Monitoring and providing the technical details about the
product like piece length, width, weight and defects of the
fabric.
• Product and materials are reported as the product travels
through the production process.
• Average price, shelf life, expiration date, quality grade, original
batch, etc. are also maintained by this module.
Maintenance
• This module keeps track and gives maintenance overview of
the machines.
• It schedules the machine maintenance according to the
production plan.
• It keeps track and monitors maintenance activities; lubrication
of machine parts, replacement of faulty parts, etc. are
required on which machines.
• It also maintains spare parts and accessories store rooms.
• Generation of reports on the maintenance activities, machine
breakdowns and use of spare parts are also possible.
Machine Setting
• The electronic and mechanical settings of the machine are
recorded in this module.
• Settings are stored with respect to the product barcode, which
can be retrieved and reapplied.
• This gives the flexibility to reapply the most promising settings
for a specific product to obtain the optimal result and
efficiency.
Quality Management
• The major task of quality management module is assurance of
required product quality as demanded by the customer.
• This module monitors and controls the quality of incoming
goods.
• This module also helps to control product quality during
production processes and their laboratory testing.
• Textile product is marked against its quality and the product
history is maintained in this module.
• It also ensures the quality by generating timely reports and
also provides tracking in case of customer claims and provides
graphical display of test results.
Image Analysis
• Digital Image analysis is the most common technique, used to
identify the weave and color repeat of fabric.
• A high resolution image of woven fabric, converted to digital
data, is used for recognition of weave pattern.
• This digital data is transmitted and reflected, to identify the
warp and weft overlaps, number of yarns, size and color by
comparing them with grey scale values.
 Data Mining
• Data Mining is an inter-disciplinary subject of information
technology, driving its roots from data management, artificial
intelligence, machine learning and statistics.
• It is also known as the knowledge discovery from data (KDD),
which is a process of extracting useful information from data.
• With time, technology has progressed at a very fast rate.
• This erupting progress, computerization of society along with
cheaper, powerful storage devices makes it possible for the
data to be stored in huge amounts of terabytes and
petabytes.
• Each and every field of life starting from business society,
banking, finance, science, engineering and medical sciences
are getting benefit from data mining.
Data mining steps to extract useful
information
Data Mining
• All of these fields are the sources for generating massive data sets,
which includes sales transactions, stock trading records, product
descriptions, sales promotions, company profiles and performance,
and customer feedback.
• But the problem is humans are incapable of analyzing this amount of
data.
• This problem gave rise to the birth of an emerging and most rapidly
growing field, “Data Mining”.
• Data mining not only analyses the data but also presents the useful
knowledge, extracted from the data in some presentable and
interpretable format that can be easily comprehended by humans.
• Different techniques involving artificial intelligence and machine
learning algorithms have been developed, that enable the
computers to automatically explore the dataset, analyze and extract
the information useful to our problem solution.
Textile Testing
• Computer is also widely used in textile testing. The
incorporations of computers and microprocessors have
brought great changes to the instrumentation used for testing
textiles.
• Their use falls into two main categories: Recording and
calculation of results and automation of the test procedure.
• Both of these uses may be found in the most advanced
instruments.
Computer is used in color
matching