TEXTILE INDUSTRY & E-COMMERCE

Textile Industry & E-Commerce

Textile Industry & E-Commerce

Introduction

E-commerce is an exemplary concept in the future of textile and apparel industry. It is playing a major role in the present scenario of textile and apparel industry. It is also very significant that the future of textile and apparel industry is complete only with E-commerce. Diverse e-commerce applications are being implemented in the textile and apparel supply chain. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have the capacity to make extravagant amounts of information available to users located in various parts of the world. ICTs also facilitate rapid communication between them. One application of these technologies is in the development of e-commerce to support electronic trading.

E-Commerce A New Concept and Scope

E-commerce can be specified as any form of economic activity conducted through computer-mediated networks. The potential of e-commerce caught public's attention as a result of ventures such as the electronic bookshop. As a result there are a growing number of other Internet-based retailers in the business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce area. However, business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce is growing much more quickly than B2C forms of electronic trading. E-commerce is a new and exciting technology, attracting much interest. It has the power of fundamentally changing the ways in which companies do business. It is having a profound effect on the management of the supply chain. Aspects of e-commerce are much diversified (Scott, pp. 1517-1536).

Textile Industry

The textile industry encompasses a sequence of production processes that transform raw materials into finished textiles and clothing products. Production in these sectors is shaped by two fundamental characteristics. First, cloth is relatively malleable and fragile, so commodity manufacturing in these industries has resisted automation and remained labor-intensive. Second, because the industry's production processes are divisible and able to be separated or vertically disintegrated into sequential stages, firms are able to locate each stage of production at the most advantageous site. As a result, the sector has developed a globalized organizational structure. Figure 1 provides a simplified view of the textiles production sequence (Gereffi, pp. 95-123).

The raw materials used to make textiles include natural fibers, human-made fibers, and combinations of the two. Natural fibers include cotton, wool, silk, flax, and hemp. Human-made or synthetic fibers can be obtained from processing petrochemicals (nylon and polyester) or made from cellulose, which is derived from wood or cotton (rayon and viscose). Although the actual processes differ depending on the type of fiber, textile production involves spinning thread, weaving or knitting it into fabric, and then dyeing and finishing the fabric in different ways, depending on the intended end use. Technological advances in fiber manufacturing have generated a highly automated and capital-intensive subsector. In addition, a vibrant research sector is developing patentable new fibers that combine natural and synthetic materials for a range of high-technology applications (e.g., the carbon-coated textiles used in the aerospace industry).

Textiles have a wide range of industrial, household, and personal uses. They are the principal material in ropes, sacks, canvases, and fiberglass and have a wide range of industry uses ...