Apparel Production
Apparel Production
This domain tests production planning, cutting-room workflow, line balancing, work measurement and finishing. Expect questions on capacity, efficiency and bottleneck control.
Core rules and concepts
- Production planning matches orders, capacity, fabric availability and delivery dates. It includes pre-production, cutting, sewing, finishing and packing.
- Cutting room steps: fabric inspection, spreading, marker making, cutting, bundling, numbering and ticketing. Marker efficiency is the used area divided by total marker area.
- Sewing systems include progressive bundle, unit production and modular cells. Line balancing assigns operations so no station starves or overloads.
- Standard allowed minutes (SAM) measure work content. Efficiency = earned minutes ÷ attended minutes × 100.
- The bottleneck sets line output; improving a non-bottleneck does not raise throughput unless it feeds the bottleneck.
Worked example
A line has five operations with SAMs of 1.2, 1.5, 2.0, 1.6 and 1.4 minutes. The shift is 480 minutes with 45 minutes planned downtime. Available time = 435 minutes. The bottleneck is 2.0 minutes, so maximum output = 435 ÷ 2.0 = 217.5, read as 217 complete units. Using the average SAM of 1.54 minutes would wrongly suggest about 282 units. The reasoning is that output is constrained by the slowest operation, and partial units cannot be shipped.
Traps
Do not average operation times to find capacity. Do not ignore planned downtime, rework or absenteeism. Do not confuse marker efficiency with fabric utilization after end loss. Do not treat SAM as actual time.