Tag Archive for 'cactus'

Another one bites the dust…

Published by Ben Kepes on August 23, 2008 in Business, Economic Development, Manufacturing, My businesses, New Zealand, Society and Strategy. 2 Comments

Its been a few months since I had a rant about the demise of first world manufacturing. Sure there are companies like American Apparel and my own Cactus Climbing creating a brand story out of retaining a first world manufacturing ethos but they are in the minority.

News this morning that yet another apparel manufacturer is closing down, citing cheap imports as the main reason for their demise. Apart from the obvious concerns about the social, economic and environmental impacts of moving production to third world countries (has anyone noticed the air at the Beijing Olympics?), on a more personal note it’s sad to see a bunch of skilled craftspeople no longer employed through no fault of their own.

It makes me, once again, want to suggest that we all have a look at the country of origin of the garments we’re all wearing today and once we’ve done that check out this movie - it’s all food for thought…

[Postscript - interesting to note that one of the companies in the movie, Macpac, is no longer, despite their move to third world manufacturing. Maybe the answer isn't as simple as offshoring our impacts????]

Share the love...
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphere] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »

SaaS in a twilight industry!

Published by Ben Kepes on June 23, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, My businesses, New Zealand and SaaS. 6 Comments

One of my businesses is a design and manufacturing operation. Cactus manufactures backpacks and outdoors clothing. For years we’ve been using PAD which is a CAD/CAM software package to make patterns for the apparel industry. PAD works well but has always been a little backwards in terms of development, online availability and the like.

A new offering that one of my colleagues mentioned to me today is pretty interesting. Pattern pieces get created in the installed application as they always have but from here things have changed. In the past, when one wanted to make a marker (the template to cut out all the pattern pieces) one spent ages playing around with the pieces to get the highest efficiency. Obviously given labour costs, this is less than efficient.

The new system combined the PAD offering, with some technology created by New Zealand business ShapeShifter. ShapeShifter is apparel optimisation software - it uses some cool algorithms to reduce fabric consumption and optimise production planing.

In a nice little SaaS/Traditional combination, we can now email our pattern pieces directly to PAD where, as an added service to owners of their software, an automatic process occurs which creates the most efficient lay plans possible using ShapeShifter’s offering.

In our case - it formerly took a highly skilled (and paid) worker 30 minutes or so to create a marker with 80% efficiency. The new offering achieves higher efficiencies, at no cost and in a similar amount of time.

Nice work guys!

Share the love...
[Bloglines] [BlogMarks] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphere] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »