Agile, One Pair Shoe Production System

Footwear companies are more and more confronted with the need of responding rapidly and efficiently to market demands; fashion trends change from year to year and most of the time shoe companies have to prepare up to four distinct collections per year. This means a tremendous amount of design work during the conceptual and styling phase of a new shoe design and the challenge to rapidly tum the winning ideas (those articles that have gathered the highest interest from potential customers during trade shows and fair events) into producible projects and, eventually, in finished products. Andali this within a time span that, in the worst case, hardly exceeds a few weeks. The introduction of Computer Aided Design in the footwear field has greatly helped shoe makers in improving their responsiveness and in increasing the quality of their design work; more recently Concurrent Engineering techniques have also been adopted in this field in arder to execute in a simultaneous way, instead of one after the other, the highest possible number of design tasks. It is also becoming important to evaluate ex-ante some aspects of the final products, such as their costs and their impact on production, in arder to improve the design process and to make i t "self leaming" rather than assessing these aspects ex-post after the first samples of the new design are produced. Tools to satisfy these requirements are being studied and development work is ongoing at technology supplying companies, software developers and research centres. This paper focuses some aspects of the application of such a concurrent approach to shoe design and manufacturing, in the framework of a technical cooperati an between European and Chinese research institutions.