2017-01-13 08:02:23
rlp
Making trainers with robots and 3D printers
Jan 14th 2017
BEHIND closed doors in the Bavarian town of Ansbach a new factory is taking
shape. That it will use robots and novel production techniques such as additive
manufacturing (known as 3D printing) is not surprising for Germany, which has
maintained its manufacturing base through innovative engineering. What is
unique about this factory is that it will not be making cars, aircraft or
electronics but trainers and other sports shoes an $80bn-a-year industry that
has been offshored largely to China, Indonesia and Vietnam. By bringing
production home, this factory is out to reinvent an industry.
The Speedfactory, as the Ansbach plant is called, belongs to Adidas, a giant
German sports-goods firm, and is being built with Oechsler Motion, a local firm
that makes manufacturing equipment. Production is due to begin in mid-2017,
slowly at first and then ramping up to 500,000 pairs of trainers a year. Adidas
is constructing a second Speedfactory near Atlanta for the American market. If
all goes well, they will spring up elsewhere, too.
The numbers are tiny for a company that makes some 300m pairs of sports shoes
each year. Yet Adidas is convinced the Speedfactory will help it to transform
the way trainers are created. The techniques it picks up from the project can
then be rolled out to other new factories as well as to existing ones,
including in Asia where demand for sports and casual wear is rising along with
consumer wealth.
Currently, trainers are made mostly by hand in giant factories, often in Asian
countries, with people assembling components or shaping, bonding and sewing
materials. Rising prosperity in the region means the cost of manual work
outsourced to the region is rising. Labour shortages loom. Certain jobs require
craft skills which are becoming rarer; many people now have the wherewithal to
avoid tasks that can be dirty or monotonous.
Adidas s motivation for its Speedfactories, however, goes well beyond labour
cost. People want fashionable shoes immediately, but the supply chain struggles
to keep up. The way our business operates is probably the opposite of what
consumers desire, says Gerd Manz, the company s head of technology innovation.
From the first sketch of a completely new pair of trainers to making and
testing prototypes, ordering materials, sending samples back and forth,
retooling a factory, working up production and eventually shipping the finished
goods to the shops can take the industry as long as 18 months. Yet some
three-quarters of new trainers are now on sale for less than a year. An order
to replenish an existing, in-demand design the latest edition of the NMD R1,
say, a popular trainer in 2015-16 can take two or three months to reach the
shelves, unless the shoes travel not in a shipping container but at huge cost
in the hold of an aircraft.
On your marks...
The Speedfactory s main strength is to shorten the supply chain, and so the
time to shops, to less than a week, perhaps even to a day, once the trainer
design is complete. The design process itself is increasingly done digitally.
The trainers are not just styled on a computer screen but can also be tested by
the computer for things like fit and performance. To enhance the process, the
Speedfactory will also have a digital twin: a virtual computer model in which
production of the new trainers can be simulated. Once all is well, the digital
product will then move to the physical production system.
Adidas claims its new production system is extremely fast and highly flexible.
The details are being kept secret for now. What is known, however, is that
instead of ordering components that will be assembled into a new pair of
trainers, the Speedfactory will instead make most of the parts itself from raw
materials, such as plastics, fibres and other basic substances.
The machines carrying out this work will be highly automated and use processes
such as computerised knitting, robotic cutting and additive manufacturing,
which involves building up shapes layer by layer. Industrial 3D printing
machines are appearing in many different forms and are capable of handling an
increasing variety of materials. Driven by software, the robots, knitting
machines and 3D printers take their instructions directly from the
computer-design program, so they can switch from making one thing to another
quickly, without having to stop production for what can amount to several days
in order to retool conventional machines and instruct manual workers.
Not every job in the Speedfactory will be automated. Robots can be slower and
less precise at some tasks, such as the final shaping of a shoe. So each
Speedfactory will create 160 production jobs, compared with a thousand or more
in a typical factory in Asia. The new functions will also be more highly
skilled. Adidas wants the new plants to complement the Asian operations, not to
compete with them. But as advanced manufacturing expands, the need for armies
of manual workers in Asian factories will surely diminish.
Sneakerheads are likely to approve. This will lead to products that will look
and perform differently, says Mr Manz. Leaving behind manual production
methods will allow Adidas to come up with novel shapes and finishes. One new
material the firm has already experimented with is Biosteel, a synthetic silk
made by AMSilk, a German biotech company. Production will also become more
customised, perhaps even with bespoke trainers fashioned from a computer scan
of how a person walks or runs.
In such a competitive and trend-driven market, one thing is certain: Adidas s
arch-rival Nike will not just sit on the touchline. The American company faces
similar cost increases in Asia and is equally keen to shorten the time it takes
to get new products to market.
One of its initiatives is a form of computerised knitting to make the upper
parts of a range of trainers it calls Flyknit, much like the way a sock is
knitted. Nike has also set up what it calls an Advanced Product Creation Centre
at its headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, to explore other automated production
methods, including 3D printing. The company has already employed these
techniques to produce customised shoes for some top athletes. The race between
the world s biggest sports-shoe makers is about to become much more fleet of
foot.