Page 12 - Industrial Cutting of Textile Materials

Preface

In competitive global market, manufacturers of textile goods are constantly forced to
offer greater product selection, deliver goods faster, and reduce their costs. For several
decades, the cost savings were reached by reducing operating costs – using lower-cost
labour and advanced manufacturing tools to improve production efficiency. However,
over the past years, input costs such as labour, energy, and raw materials are constantly
increasing. Now, to maintain the trend of low cost, the time has come to make good
and well-grounded changes in work organization and material savings directly in the
product manufacturing process. In this context, a cutting room has become the most
vital place in an enterprise as exactly its management and production processes de-
termine raw material-consumption efficiency and ensure smooth flow of work to all
further manufacturing processes.
Developing the first edition of the book, my main task was to describe in construc-
tive and thorough way all technological processes performed in a cutting room. It was
important as there were no any other books published before, dedicated to these topics
in such way. Now, it is done, and for the second edition of the book, I have put the new
following tasks:
To inform a reader about advanced technologies entering a cutting room during the last
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5 years;
To describe cutting of wider spectrum of textiles – garment textiles and also home and tech-
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nical textiles;
To put accent on automation of work processes performed in a cutting room.
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Because of these new research directions, the second edition of Industrial cutting of
textile materials has changed its main target auditorium. Firstly, the book is addressed
to manufacturing specialists at various levels of expertise who want to develop their
business and invest in new technologies and equipment. It is also addressed to all
other readers who are interested to learn and understand textile cutting technologies,
to see their advantages and disadvantages and different applications, and with it to feel
educated in this topic.
During the time period after publishing the first edition, a lot of work processes in a
cutting room have got automated. The most amazing improvements have changed till
now very much time- and work-consuming processing of styles from intricate-pattern
fabrics (striped, checked, and others). From manual work process greatly dependent
on skills of highly experienced workers, it has become fully automated, productive,
and very flexible process. By help of automation, importance of human resources is
reducing also in many other work processes in a cutting room. Decision-making is left
to specialized software; general and user’s developed databases help to choose optimal