A structured approach for customised production in SME collaborative networks

Abstract

This research aims to provide a model for SMEs to address needs and expectations of specific target groups – such as elderly, obese, disabled, or diabetic persons – to customise functional and fashionable clothes and footwear of high quality, affordable price and eco-compatible. This will be achieved by the development of a new framework for the textile, clothing and footwear industry (TCFI) based on methods and tools for (co-)design, development, configuration, production, and distribution of small order quantities in collaborative networks. The aim of this paper is to describe the reference model depicting its structure and the related tools for collaborative networks enabling products to stay as long as possible digital in order to be produced on-demand.

Keywords:

• small series
• customisable healthy fashionable goods
• consumer groups
• supply networks
• co-creation

Acknowledgements

This work has been partly funded by the European Commission through the FP7-2010-NMP-ICT-FoF Project CoReNet: ‘Customer-Oriented and Eco-Friendly Networks for Healthy Fashionable Goods’ (Grant Agreement 260169). The authors wish to acknowledge the Commission for their support. We also wish to acknowledge our gratitude and appreciation to all the CoReNet project partners for their contribution during the development of ideas and concepts presented in this paper.