Wharram Designs Ltd are manufacturers of furniture for the healthcare, hotel and leisure industries. Operations on site include the assembly of pre-manufactured furniture frames, cutting of fabric and upholstering the furniture.

The research undertaken by Environmental Technologies Centre of Industrial Collaboration (ETCIC) was an audit of the operations on site to identify ways of reducing the amount of material (fabric) left at the end of a production run, therefore improving resource efficiency.

Wharram Designs Limited produce in excess of 200 different product lines. The company offer a wide selection of fabrics for the upholstering of the furniture but also allow customers to specify any fabrics of their choice. Therefore there is a wide range of fabrics that are used by Wharram Design, both plain and patterned.

Wharram Designs have calculated the amount of fabric that is required to upholster a single chair for each of their product lines. The majority of the products have also had a cutting plan produced which shows how to get the most efficient use out of the fabric for one chair. However the company are finding that when they are manufacturing a number of chairs e.g. 20 then they are being left with significant volumes of fabric.

The left over fabric is currently being stored on site and is used where possible on other orders. However space is limited and there is no guarantee that an order will be placed that requires that type of fabric.

The company have a good understanding of how to get the most efficient use out of fabric for the main product lines which they are manufacturing most of the time. The issues are mainly occurring with the less frequently produced lines and fabrics / patterns that are rarely used.

There are issues with using left over fabric on a new production run. If there isn’t enough fabric for all the chairs in the order then new fabric will have to be ordered in. As the fabrics may well have come from different production runs then there is likely to be slight differences in shade and colour. Therefore this could lead to chairs within the same order having slightly different appearances, leading to customer dissatisfaction.

Other issues with the upholstering of furniture are that the patterns must all run in the same direction, therefore the cutting plans to get the most efficient use of the fabric can be quite complicated. Even plain fabrics can be an issue as fabrics will have a pile. If this is not running in the same direction for each of the fabric parts then it may appear to be slightly different shades.

Recommendations

To get the most efficient use out of the fabrics and be left with as little left over fabric as possible it is recommended that a cutting plan be developed for each order. Therefore the minimum amount of fabric could be ordered to upholster the number of chairs in the order. Wharram Design have cutting plans for the majority of their products but these are only for one unit of each product. As orders are usually for several units then the cutting plan will not make the most efficient use of the fabric. A cutting plan should therefore be produced for each order so that the most efficient use of material is made for that production run. However generation of the cutting plans can be quite time consuming and if done for each order then it would take up a significant amount of someone’s time. There is software available on the market that can produce cutting plans. A search was conducted to identify a number of these software programs and the results were presented to Wharram Design for further investigation and trial.