The Factory Floor
You follow how a cut order becomes finished garments: the rooms, the machines, the people, and the minute as the unit everything is measured in.
After this track you can
You can walk a factory from cutting table to packed carton and account for where every minute went. You can balance a line against a target, and say which of your rooms is the constraint on a given order.
7 courses · 14 h 10 min
- 5.1Inside a Garment Factory: the Rooms, the Minute and the DecisionFoundation3 lessons · 1 h 50 minYou walk one cargo-short order through six rooms of a real factory. You see the documents that travel with it, and why the factory's currency is the minute rather than the piece. And you see the day a supervisor made an entirely sensible decision that cost the factory sixty-seven garments a day.
- 5.2The Cutting RoomPractitioner3 lessons · 2 hThe marker is already agreed, and this is what happens to the cloth afterwards. You follow one knit order across the cutting table. The fabric was spread correctly but cut fifty minutes too early. You see what a straight knife does between the top ply and the bottom, and why you cannot recut a bundle that cannot name the roll it came from.
- 5.3Sewing Floor and Line BalancingPractitioner3 lessons · 2 h 20 minYou take one scrub-top order on one line. You read an operation bulletin line by line until two of its entries turn out to be untrue. You balance the line against a target, and price the balance when it is wrong. Then you follow a constraint that moves three times in six working days before it settles on a station nobody was watching.
- 5.4Work Study, SMV and CapacityAdvanced3 lessons · 2 h 30 minYou take one shirt order and one stopwatch. You break an operation into elements and rate it. You rebuild allowances from two real workplaces instead of copying them off a report. You take a factory's capacity apart into the five different banks of minutes it might have come from. And you end with what an SMV can never tell you.
- 5.5Finishing, Pressing and PackingPractitioner3 lessons · 1 h 40 minYou take the room that makes a good garment look like one, and where a late order is lost. You see what pressing repairs, what it hides until the customer washes it, and what it causes. You count the finishing floor's real hourly rate before it eats your last week. And you treat packing as a measured process rather than a habit.
- 5.6Lean and Continuous Improvement: Making a Gain, and Making It StayAdvanced3 lessons · 1 h 50 minYou take one sewing line, one improvement, and the ten weeks in which it quietly left. You see where lean's assumptions hold in a factory that changes style often, and where they break, priced. You learn to run one change so the result can be told apart from an ordinary good fortnight. And you meet the four forces that take a proven gain apart while the output figure keeps rising.
- 5.7Packaging, Assortments and Buyer Packing ManualsPractitioner3 lessons · 2 hYou read one pyjama-shorts order through the buyer's packing manual. A revision acknowledged by email took a tenth of the margin. In a ratio pack, 43 missing pieces removed 516 from the shipment. And a barcode that scanned two hundred times at the factory failed at the distribution centre.
Track exam
12 questions drawn from a larger bank, across the courses in this track, passed at 70%. 3 attempts, then it locks for 7 days. It is worth finishing the courses first.
Sit the track exam