Objectives and achievements of Ishtar |
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ISHTARInnovative SHop for Textile and AppaRel
industries
The Ishtar project pertains to the European textile-clothing sector
and aims to test new technologies in the production of "made-to-measure"
garments. The injection of technology to realize "made-to-measure"
garments at an industrial level has the purpose to offer the customers a
strongly custom-made service at reasonable costs and
time. The "made to measure" approach is one of the ways identified at a
European level to face the
competition with countries with low labour costs; besides, it allows this
industrial sector to shift from an offer-driven approach to the production
on demand, resulting in clear benefits for the consumers and a drastic
reduction of stocks and unsold goods. For these reasons the EDP structures of HITMAN and COIN were
strongly involved in the definition of the architecture and in the
validation of the system, together with the technology suppliers of the
project. The Ishtar Project is partially funded by the Innovation programme of the IV Framework Programme of the European Commission. |
Description and objectives of the projectThe project
realizes a system of production and sale for "made to measure" garments.
It is Internet-based and unifies the procedures and the supports of three
sale channels: the traditional one in shop, the one carried on through a
network of sales representatives to customer's home and the third one
directly by Internet. In the process implemented by the system, the final consumer
chooses the garment (alone or with the aid of sale staff, according to
the distribution channel), by selecting, from an electronic catalogue, the
model, the fabric, the accessories and the
personalizations. To guarantee the delivery time, only the choice of fabrics is
allowed, the availability of which is previously checked, through
exchanging of XML booking messages, with the producer’s
warehouse. The system supports the collection of measures (that can be the
ones referred to the customer's body or modifications on a reference
model) and of the adaptations necessary to the model, using also a 3D body
scanning system (when in shop); however, the reliability of the
measurements is checked using a control knowledge
base. Once the order is completed, the producer's information management system acquires it and launches it into production, and, starting from the chosen basic model, automatically prepares the customised nexting plan of the fabric for the cutting machines. |
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Click here for more details about the results |
Organizational impact
The system directly involves two actors of the Textile/Clothing
supply chain: the Garment Supplier and the Retailer, allowing them to
exchange complex orders by electronic way and to optimise the sale by
sharing information about the available fabrics in the
store. Considering the distribution, the innovation can be seen on several
perspectives: at the beginning, a commercial structure can easily start
offering a ”made to measure” service without changing the organisation of
the existing sale channel, considering the system as a flexible and self
explaining support; in perspective, however, it is possible that the
marketing policies can create far more sophisticated and fanciful
synergies between the various sale channels. A flexibility element lies in the fact that the two sides of the
system, vendor and producer, are technologically independent and only
constrained to exchange messages in XML format according to a quite simple
procedure. The experimentation of the system has foreseen the involvement of two different sale organizations and a producer of “made to measure” garments (that are pilot users of the project) during regular sale operations with real customers. |
Critical pointsA first critical point is the virtual
representation of the garment and, above all, of the fabric. The adoption
of sophisticated technologies has been balanced and verified with the aim
to have an easy updating of the catalogue (every 6 months about 150
fabrics change) and to use simple standard browser for the
visualization. The second one is that of versatility and
opening towards other actors: at the moment, international standards for
data exchange, between
producers and distribution, to represent the data of “made to measure” garments, do not exist; the system uses XML
messages of public format to allow any company to send or receive the
orders, either if provided with automated information management systems
or with human operators entrusted to read and switch
them. At last, the use of Internet as sale channel (the only case in which the final customer is alone in front of the monitor): this channel has been considered remunerative only if activated in synergy with other sale channels. |
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