Apparel Supply Chain Management: ICT Contribution to Networking Sustainability and Competitiveness

Emerging concepts of clothing as made-to-measure fashion items require a paradigm change in customer service and customer relationships management with a focus on value-adding product-services. In the same time, industry competitive pressure asks for production flexibility and sustainability associated with cost cutting. This situation criticality looks for new policies in the apparel supply chain management, covering efficient life-cycle design, global sourcing strategies, stock control and waste reduction policies, build-to-order production, technology innovation. Appropriate management concepts building on knowledge and advanced technological tools developed and integrated within a seamless common architecture for this industrial sector are presented and discussed. This framework - the Extended Smart Sustainable Organisation (xSSO), based on research work developed within the Leapfrog European research project - is suggested to become the new networking oriented, integrative framework for the organisation of flexible apparel manufacturing of the future.