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The Leapfrog IP project

1 Overview
2 Rationale
3 Objectives
4 Project structure
5 Contacts

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Overview

Simplified project overview

The LEAPFROG Integrated Project attempts to modernise and ultimately transform the clothing sector into a demand-driven, knowledge-based, high-tech industry by exploitation of recent advances in a broad area of scientific-technological fields ranging from

nanotechnology and polymeric material science,
robotics and innovative joining techniques,
3D computer graphics and animation, to
e-business and management research.

If LEAPFROG research and development work reaches its objectives there will be enormous innovation and new business potential across the entire spectrum of textile, clothing, machinery and service companies in Europe.

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Rationale

The Rationale behind Leapfrog IP

The high-labour cost component

Clothing production in Europe suffers from the high labour cost component involved in garment manufacture which makes this activity largely uncompetitive in high-labour cost countries.

The quality component

The heavy quality critical human intervention in garment made-up operations leads to unusually high levels of faulty products - up to 20% even in well-run factories with qualified operators - unimaginable in most other industrial production processes.

Relocation or high-tech automation?

Rather than tackling the challenge of developing high-tech production systems, clothing industry and distribution resorted to relocation to low labour-cost manufacturing locations often far away from the point of consumption.

This decreased unit production costs but inflated costs for supply chain organisation and logistics, quality assurance and IPR protection.

Capitalising on new design & virtual prototyping tools and new organisation concepts

Apart from high-tech production, other fields of potentially massive efficiency gains are:

the garment design and prototyping process which today remains much too time and cost intensive with its craft-like organisation, lengthy trial and error procedures and inefficient means of communication.
the overall organisation of the clothing business with all its supply chain and further business partners. Inefficiencies in this area are responsible for frequent overstock as well as out-of-stock situations, for enormous missed business opportunities, idle capacity and waste problems on all stages of the supply chain. These inefficiencies are also responsible for the fact that, despite an every increasing choice of clothing products in Europe's shops, supply hardly kept pace with growing consumer expectations and too often frustrated shoppers miss the right size in their desired colour and style, complain about poor product quality despite high prices and finally spend their money on other consumer products.

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Objectives

In order to achieve the long-term industrial transformation of the Clothing Industry the LEAPFROG initiative will focus on 3 major objectives:

A step-change in productivity, quality and cost efficiency in the garment manufacturing process.
- Radical reductions in the product design and development time and cost through direct 3D design and virtual prototyping, fabric and garment simulation, fit and comfort evaluation on animated virtual mannequins representative of real consumer morphotypes, cost and manufacturability prediction. (RMC)
- Radical reengineering and intelligent automation of the key tasks of handling and sewing for significant reduction of labour cost component in garment manufacture and a massive quality increase. (RMB)
- A significant improvement of fabric preparation facilitating subsequent clothing manufacturing operation through fabric pre-forming and temporary or permanent fabric stiffening. (RMA)
- Overall integration and organisation of all individual processes and technologies into a highly efficient and flexible manufacturing shop floor. (IM)
A radical move towards rapid customised manufacturing in one of the most demand-volatile sectors through flexibilisation and integration of cost-effective and sustainable processes from fabric processing through to customer delivery.
- Development of concepts and tools for a flexible organisation of garment production in extended supply networks - the extended Smart Garment Organisation (xSGO). (IM)
- Methods and systems for efficient product development and fast production ramp-up and roll-out in geographically spread manufacturing networks. (IM)
A paradigm change in customer service and customer relationship management with a focus on value-adding product-services.
- Further development of concepts and tools for industrial mass customisation and made-to-order of clothing and their effective integration with the point of sale. (IM)