Case study - Decathlon | Atracio

Production Efficiency Monitoring

Clothes & Garment

For one leading sportswear company, saying ahead of the competition requires constant quest to optimize production volumes and quantity by following their prodution down to the unit level.

Our solution is providing an end-to-end view of each production chain in terms of workload and quality indicators. This has allowed our Customer to be more reactive in their production planning with faster responce time to the ever changing tastes and requirements of the market place.

CHALLENGE

As one of the biggest sportswear manufacturers in the world, our customer strives continuously to optimize its production efficiency and minimize idle time and defects rate in its production runs. One of their biggest hurdle toward reaching that goal is the lack of timely, reliable and detailed information about the output of their production lines as they had to rely on a team of control agents that reported manually the number of items produced as well as their status (Valid, Rework or Second Choice).

This reporting was done at the top of each hour on whiteboards located at the end of each production line. The type and source of any defect were handwritten on paper forms by the Quality Control Agents.

At the end of each day, a Project Officer had to compile the hourly data from every whiteboard before sending the full daily report to the management team in Morocco and in France (HQ). Slow production pace and high defect rates was usually spotted late into the day which was delaying the root cause analysis process.

SOLUTION

Atracio supplied a full scale tracking solution from design to delivery to client’s local factory in which was picked as a pilot site. Atracio worked very closely with the team to design and implement an RFID based solution: SmartLine which offers real time, end-to-end information on the production by line along with. RFID readers at both ends of each production line automatically scans the entry and exit of articles.

This information is relayed in real time on large displays mounted on each line as well as on a web application. Quality Control Agents are now equipped with an Connected Industrial Tablets that allow them to scan the RFID tag on each article and specify its quality status as well as the defect type and source if applicable.

The global management team has exhaustive, real time visibility of the factory performance on a web application that features a built-in BI Engine to offer more insights from the collected data.

RESULTS

Real time, end-to-end information on the production by line along with WIP (Work-In-Progress).
Proactive decision making by being better equipped to identify any issue with production quality and pace instantaneously.
Control agents has changed from compiling data to analyzing it and taking the appropriate action plan.
More ergonomic workplace eliminating all paper forms and reports.