Footwear and other leather articles manufacturing remains labor intensive despite the great technological advances in the industry , being two of the main constraints the intensive use of stitching to join/weld pieces and the number of manual operations done. Consequently, it has forced manufacturers in the past to locate their production plants in many cases away from their customers in low labour cost locations (Asia). The assembly and construction method also imply high waste production. Depending on the construction method between 10-40% in material area is wasted, very often leather material, with a cost of 4-6 eur/sq feet and typically wasting 4 eur/pair of shoes as material lost.
The 3D BONDING project addresses a multidisciplinary disruptive process, based on a patent (Simplicity Works- PCT/ES2012/07001369), for highly automated manufacturing of high end leather footwear (it can be extended to other stitched leather artciles) reducing labour costs associated to stitching and assembly by 48%, reducing the total number of operations from 70 (traditional manufacturing) to 20 (proposed 3D Bonding system) and using 20% less leather material (on average) than current processes. In the final configuration we plan to keep manual just input/ouput of moulds and uploading cutted leather pieces to the manufacturing line (done either manual or with co-bots). 3D Bonding simplifies a complex process, such is footwear manufacturing.
Currently, the building blocks of current shoe industries are recognizable in a number of very clear elements: the splitting of complex processes into a number of elementary tasks , sequenced in a serial way with a classical Fordist type manufacturing chain approach (organization) , the availability of machines of various complexity to support the operators in the execution of the different production steps (mechanization) , the specific layout of the work places dedicated to the execution of the manufacturing tasks, according to the different main phases of the production process and to the systems used to transport raw materials, components, semifinished and finished items from one point to the other of the factory floor (layout and transportation). If we had to summarize the key features of such setups, we could say:
• The presence of workers is still abundant and pervasive in virtually all phases (cutting, stitching-closing, making and finishing rooms).
• Even though some of the machines nowadays available are capable of automatic, NC controlled operations (hence in theory they could perform the tasks they were designed for by themselves), workers are anyway there to supervise and control their operations.
• Despite some attempts to think of more modern systems that might overcome the limitations and the rigidity of mechanical conveyors , these are still dominant in all shoe factories. Solutions for the making (lasting) room haven’t reached yet the desired level of evolution, with these departments typically featuring more “classical” mechanical conveyors with little or none flexibility.
• A classical compartmented organization made of units and warehouses, in which the process units (say stitching for example) are fed by stock of materials stored in the input warehouse and they send semi-finished items (uppers in this case) to an output warehouse;
Therefore, there is a clear need for a more reliable, minimally operated by workers and simplified production system for leather shoes, without stitching, aided by robots in manipulation steps and more important, a scalable manufacturing solution for shoes bringing production back to EU, close to customers and local markets, more sustainable and using less resources.
The Overall Objective of the 3D BONDING innovation project is to bridge the current gaps in the innovation stage of a sustainable and innovative disruptive manufacturing process for footwear (it might be used for other 3D articles) avoiding stitching and bringing a traditional process to a highly digital-automated and achieve a successful commercial launch by 2022. The current project is establish to overcome our barriers associated to be the FIRST OF A KIND process through process scale up, required for testing and trials and to stablish productivity and economic assessment – for secure support royalties and market claims.
Although short production runs have been produced on relevant environment and the results have been validated by several potential clients and in september 2018 a real industrial trial has been done at AMF factory Portugal with the new Assembly Station (core of the system) with good results, we need to overcome several barriers in order to bring 3D BONDING into market, such as: setting up a Minimum Viable industrial Process (MVP) to obtain firm documentation industrial and economic benefits to overcome intrinsic scepticism to new products-processes into a conservative market; achieving royalties in the target initial markets, increasing the awareness of DESMA to mobilise stakeholders; reducing cost of manufacturing for large scale production.
