Together, these execs chatted about the benefits of new communication tools, the advantage of artificial intelligence and automation, and how their companies have pushed themselves to focus on sustainability.
In terms of manufacturing, on the notion of remote management and monitoring, we used to say, 'We need people on site.' But in the last nine months, we've been using the data of digital twins to monitor the systems. People have accepted that. or industrial service robots — and even maybe AR and VR moving out of the 'toy' category into something that's real and more mainstream. Someone mentioned communication: It's not high-tech but I think it's very key.
When we started thinking about this project, we were really focusing on our own internally produced textile waste in the manufacturing process. That could be lots that are mis-dyed, or something with quality, or in many cases, we just make a buffer quantity for our customers: We put in for a little margin of error, maybe 5%. This extra 5% is not necessarily always bought by the customer so it becomes excess inventory.