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Automated cutting of textile materials 139

High-ply cutters have several important advantages: they ensure very high produc-
tivity, high effectiveness cutting large orders, high quality of cut components, and high
degree of flexibility. However, they are more expensive than single-ply cutters, not
efficient to cut small orders, and are not effective to process the styles from intricate
pattern fabrics where pattern matching is required (see Section 15.3).

9.3.13 Automated knife cutting systems in the garment industry
The introduction of automated knife cutting systems has brought significant changes
in garment manufacturing. Several factors contribute to the superiority of these cut-
ting systems over other cutting techniques. Automated high-ply knife cutting sys-
tems are highly efficient in cutting large orders of styles that have components of
complex shape. The use of vacuum systems to compress the plies avoids the dis-
placement of material plies that is a serious problem of the manual cutting process.
The quality of the cut components is also significantly increased because of the
precision of the knife movement. The elimination of the material displacement and
the deflection of the knife reduce the amount of material used and decrease the size
of buffers around the patterns in the markers. These factors contribute to the very
high productivity of automated multi-ply knife cutting systems. For several decades,
the high-ply cutters have been the most efficient cutting equipment used in garment
industry.
During the last decade, the market demands are changing. Retailers require wide
diversity of styles manufactured in small quantities. The small orders are replacing
large ones, and the high-ply cutters slowly lose their importance. The purchase
of the single-ply knife cutter that can process a single material ply and also low
spreads has become well-grounded necessity for many manufacturing sites. Single-
ply cutters are less expensive and much more effective to process small orders.
Here, one more very important role of the single-ply cutters in advanced garment
manufacturing process has to be added. Because of the serious CAD/CAM improve-
ments during the last decade, an automated single-ply cutting directly from a fabric
roll has become the most advanced cutting method. It is the most efficient method to
cut very long components that exceed the length of the cutting table (important pro-
cessing technical textiles) and the only method that can ensure fully automated cutting
process without any human intervention. In many decades, the industrial processing
of styles from intricate pattern fabrics was extremely time- and labour-consuming
manual work process (see Chapter 14 and Section 15.2). Complicated processing and
increased fabric consumption were the reasons why garment styles with intricate pat-
terning were rather seldom seen in garment collections. Now, by the help of advanced
CAD/CAM and a single-ply cutter, styles from patterned and digitally printed fabrics
can be processed in fully automated way, dramatically increasing work efficiency, pro-
ductivity, pattern-matching quality, and fabric utilization, comparing with traditional
manually performed multi-ply two-step material spreading and cutting process (see
Section 15.2).