GENTRY SHOES

Gentry Shoes

Gentry Shoes

Project Background

British Shoe Manufacturing faces an intense and growing competitive pressure brought forth by developing countries, which are entering the global market offering low-cost workforce for the production of labour-intensive, low value added products. Moreover, these countries are rapidly modernizing their production methods and enhancing their technological capacities. This paper reports on the basic concepts of Gentry Shoes, a just started EU funded program, aimed at transforming the shoe industry and its related business model to strengthen Britain's ability to compete in terms of high added value for the customer (as cost-based competition is not compatible with the goal of maintaining the Community's social and sustainability standards). This transformation relies, on one hand, on the development of tools for the design of customer driven adding value shoes and, on the other hand, on the realization of tools for the design, configuration and reconfiguration of flexible multi-site multi-nation production factories, meant to manufacture those customer driven shoes. This paper will present the key concept meant to actualize the vision to ¡§design customer driven shoes everywhere, manufacture them intelligently anywhere¡¨ as a crucial challenge for the shoe industry to gain competitiveness in the global markets, also through better cooperation (and not only competition) with low-wage countries.

Purpose of the Project

This paper addresses the concepts and impacts related with the development of tools for the design of customer driven adding value shoes and for the design, configuration and reconfiguration of flexible multi-site multi-nation production factories, meant to manufacture those customer driven shoes, as a new paradigm to promote Shoe Sector competitiveness. The overall concept, at the base of Gentry Shoes work, can be depicted by figure 1.

Project Constraints & Assumptions

Shoe fitting to customer requirements results in greater added value and increased competitiveness. This ultimately leads to shoes production process that is commenced, directed, and scheduled by individual customer at a global scale. As production in the shoe sector is already a widely distributed process (in order to take advantage of different national contexts), this means that the customer impacts on the design of global, multi-nation, multi-site of production systems in terms of factory planning and logistics.

The User Group

In order to address this challenge and to support the proposed new paradigm, Gentry Shoes presents three main scientific and technological Pillars:

1- Design tools for customer driven and customer fit shoe, as added-value product/service;

2- Design tools for advanced industrial engineering of multi-site and multi-nation production systems and factories, based on the customer driven shoe;

3- New business models for the multi-nation multi-site shoes industry associated with the above mentioned paradigm, meant to support it.

Figure 1: overall Gentry Shoes concept

Functional Requirements

Gentry Shoes design concept promotes the full integration of the digital factory with extended multi-site multi-nation manufacturing processes, thus opening up new perspectives of collaboration between OEM firms and their suppliers globally due to enhanced interoperability: this is a radical shoe industry transformation from traditional resource-based to customer centred, knowledge-based, adaptive, networked.

Figure 2: the three pillars

The first pillar presented is meant to propose tools for supplying ...