JANUARY 2016MANUFACTURINGTECHINSIGHTS.COM8IN MY OPINIONTechnology Trends and Issues in Textile MarketingBy Tekin Gulsen, Global IT & Corporate Planning Director, Kordsa GlobalCan trends in technology impact a manufacturing in-dustry as old as textile? The answer is absolutely yes and the impact shows many similarities with other B2B and manufacturing sectors. New technologies not only enable new products and capabilities for value creation and competitive advantage, but also offer great opportunities to transform legacy systems and processes for continuous improve-ment.IoT, Big Data, Business analytics conundrumTextile manufacturing industry is not new to machine-to-machine communication technologies between the production systems, quality systems, laboratory systems and back office applications. However, the velocity, volume and variety of data have been growing over the years as the machines are getting smarter. Real-time, 24/7 monitoring of the entire shopfloor in order to manage and monitor the production process is essential and very valuable in terms of ensuring the optimum machine and labor productivity, energy efficiency and quality assurance. These systems remain as the foundation of any manufacturing company. The key differences today are the advancements in textile machine tech-nology as well as availablility and accessibility of external third party data.Utilization of "Big Data" and "Business Analyt-ics" systems can provide improvements in the fol-lowing areas especially when predictive analysis capabilities are available;· Demand and production forecast-ing by accurately modelling the busi-ness and analyzing the lagging and leading indicators of market.· Monitoring and proactive management of the operational pro-cesses by gathering and analyzing the statistics from the shopfloor.· Predictive maintenance by analyzing the machine "tireness" and indicators for a failure. · Supply chain optimization by modelling the whole supply chain and simulating the supply chain with what-if scenarios. · Quality management by fabric pattern analysis and lab test results.· Claim and complaint management by analyzing the pro-duction or logistics history of a product. · Lean manufacturing by determining the most viable prod-ucts to produce.If such systems can be implemented successfully with the right modelling of the process and accurate data, they can create solid value for the company and deliver a clear competitive advantage in the market.Product and Service InnovationAdvancements in processing and communication, mobile, cloud, social, and analytics enable all companies to explore new ways to differentiate by making smart products and providing innova-tive services.The journey of smart products basically evolve with the built-in capabilities which are Monitoring Control-ling Optimization Autonomy. Both industrial and consumer textiles are evolving with smarter products however, the consumer side has a clear edge in adop-tion and development of such products because of the increase in application areas and demand. Longer test and approval periods in industrial textiles hinder these types of product developments.Smart textiles are used in various in-dustries and robust growth is expected in sports and fitness, home health monitor-ing, protection and safety gear. Smart fabrics can be defined as products that are able to interact with their environ-ment. They have the ability to interact with the environment and physical stimuli. Sensors and actuators are the key components of smart textiles and Tekin Gulsen
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