CAD Artwork as a Competitive Advantage - computer-aided design

Digital asset management is becoming a hot buzzword in the textile and apparel industries. Here's a look at how some companies are using digital library technologies.

textile and apparel companies spend thousands of dollars annually to buy original artwork for design inspirations. These valuable assets get put in drawers, sent out to customers and frequently are lost or misplaced.

Fabrics and styles developed and/or produced by a company are also valuable assets. But finding samples often relies on diligent searches by designers, sales staff or administrative aides. GISTICS, a consulting company based in Larkspur, CA, estimates that creative professionals spend an average of one out of every 1.0 hours on file management, and search time accounts for a third of the pie.

However, a handful of companies are beginning to leverage their resources by creating digital libraries that make it easy to search, sort and locate the right fabric or file. What they are finding is that asset management not only improves productivity, it also provides the ability to exploit new revenue opportunities.

Locate, Locate, Locate

Craftex Mills, located in Blue Bell, PA, has more than 100 years worth of fabrics and designs for high-end jacquard fabrics. This third-generation family-owned company started to create a digital library three years ago. "The resources, artwork and fabric samples accumulated to the point that Terry Donahue, the head designer for the residential department, wanted to get someone in here to sort through the piles of fabric that were literally floor to ceiling," says Beverly Godfrey, the company archivist.

"The beauty of the database is the ability to locate items quickly and to reuse patterns that previously could have been lost in the back corner of a drawer," she notes. "We have a lot of customers coming here looking for older [designs], or certain types of fabrics from our archives. With the database, we can enter a request for all contemporary floral frames with 13 1/2-inch repeats done in chenille, for example. And in a few seconds [I can] pull up a collection of all the pieces that meet that requirement. Instead of looking though racks and racks of fabric, the software is really quick, and that is most helpful," Godfrey says.

Craftex chose Thumbs Up software from Raleigh, NC-based Graphic Detail to create its digital library. The database now holds 27,000 records, which include files from the company's CAD systems, as well as fabric photography from its existing swatch collection. More than 100 flat files containing thousands of pieces of artwork are currently being photographed, some of which were purchased more than 30 years ago. When that's done, there are about 50 boxes full of fabric samples waiting to be photographed and cataloged.

On average, the company produces 1,000 new products per year, and archiving them has become an integral part of the design development process. "The truck arrives daily from the mill with samples. They go to a design review meeting in the morning and then are photographed in the afternoon, before the daily post to our customers or their final destination. They get categorized either that afternoon or by the next morning," says Godfrey.

The company's sales teams in New York and North Carolina are able to request a copy of a digital image so they know what was sent to their customers. The images, which are usually low-resolution files, are sent as e-mail attachments. "We've debated whether or not to put these images on the Internet, but as always with textile companies, the issue is security," explains Godfrey. However, enabling sales people and customers to search quickly and easily for designs is important, and Craftex plans to continue researching Web capabilities.

Locking in the Value

At Culp Inc., one of the world's largest marketers of furniture upholstery fabrics and a leading supplier of mattress ticking, creating a digital artwork library was viewed as a necessary design center component. "With three divisions purchasing artwork, we realized we had an incredible investment and needed a way to get the maximum value from it," says Sheila Portela, CAD manager.

Each season, the divisions purchase their own artwork for collections. While the creative process is happening, the pieces stay in the design group's

offices. At the end of the season, the artwork is turned over to the archiving department where it is photographed, cataloged and almost literally put under lock and key.

"The designers don't get to rummage through drawers anymore," says Portela. "They can search the database for the designs they want, we retrieve the original art from storage, and then it's checked out." When the artwork is cataloged, the software -- a custom package developed for Gulp by CurrentView of Dallas, TX -- generates a barcode sticker that is placed on the back of the artwork. When the artwork is checked out, the barcode is scanned and information about who has the artwork is updated in the system. As a result, other designers searching for that piece know who has it at any time.

After three years, the company has nearly 10,000 pieces in the archive. Digital images of fabrics are also gradually being added to the database at the request of the marketing department, which needed a way to reference images for samples and colorways.

To capture images of artwork and fabric, Gulp installed a digital photography studio complete with a high-resolution camera, lighting and a computer with image editing software. The studio has proven to have many uses, including the production of high-resolution images for the CAD department and photography of materials for customer presentations.

Software Everywhere

With so much to gain from archiving, why aren't more companies rushing to create digital libraries? Randy Parker, president of Digital Images in Durham, NC, describes the usual scenario: "The first reaction is 'That would be great,' which leads to 'It costs how much?' and then 'It costs that much and takes that long?'"

Overall, creating an archive requires a serious commitment of time and resources, and there are dozens of software options ranging in price from $100 to $250,000. Textile and apparel companies are not the only firms searching for ways to organize and access their visual assets -- the graphic arts industry has been leading the charge for more than 10 years. From advertising agencies with thousands of ads, display materials and films to store to printing companies that need to organize customer jobs, there is no shortage of demand for digital libraries. The result is that there are 300-plus companies offering digital asset management tools in some form or fashion.

Almost all of the software developers serving the textile and apparel industries offer image archiving products. "Our DesignCOM software was built from the ground up by a team of developers who have a long history of working with textile and apparel designers," says Tiffany Walker, product manager for DesignCOM at NedGraphics Inc. "The benefit is that it links easily with our other software products so designers can save files in their native format instead of going through an extra step to convert them to a format such as TIFF." For sales and marketing teams that have access to an image database, the software also can be linked with another product called EasyMap, which can map textile designs into room or garment simulations.

Pointcarre USA (formerly Monarch Design Systems) takes a different approach by offering a customized version of an off-the-shelf program. Monarchive is a textile- and apparel-specific version of Portfolio from Extensis Corp. of Portland, OR. "Our customers can get up and running much faster since we do the work of customizing the field labels and organizing the database before they get started," said Jen Kiewel, systems consultant at Pointcarre. Some of the firm's customers search and sort the database for images to create self-running presentations that can be stored on a CD ROM and sent to customers.

As another option, AVA CAD/CAM's archiving system is used by some companies as part of a supply chain management system. The multi-user software allows authorized users to access and update images as they move from design to engraving to production and ultimately to sales and marketing. Anyone who accesses a file always has the most current version and a way to track where it is in the process chain. A Web browser version is also available for companies that want to provide visual references to customers and trading partners worldwide, without allowing them access to edit or manipulate the files. "Since it's a Web-based product, anyone anywhere in the world can access the archive using a standard Internet browser," notes Duncan Jeffries, marketing manager.

The Picture and the Words

There are two unique challenges in creating a digital library for the textile and apparel industries -- accurately describing a design or fabric and adequately photographing it. Terminology has always been a challenge -- one designer may describe a fabric as a gingham, the next a check. When designers started questioning some of the descriptors used for artwork at Gulp, an experiment was conducted in which groups of designers were asked to check off attributes from a list. "We decided that since everyone has different ways to describe designs, the group that purchased the artwork got final say on how it was categorized," says Portela.

"I'm a good listener," laughs Godfrey, referring to times when categories and descriptions are challenged. "If I'm doing it wrong, at least I'm doing it consistently," she adds. One of the most crucial things to do when starting an archive is to gather everyone together to agree on how items will be organized. Season, style and customer are common first-level distinctions. Most of the software programs on the market today have up to 100 fields that can be used to describe and classify items. The more accurately items are described, the easier it is to perform searching functions.

Capturing a good digital image of a fabric can be challenging. "The camera is half of the solution, the lighting is the other half, and it's hard to say which is more important," says Parker.

"Mercerized cotton damasks are the hardest for us to capture accurately," adds Godfrey, noting that shiny fabrics, subtle textures, and tone-on-tone designs require some photographic tricks.

The care required means that it's not a speedy process. "On a good day, the average person can photograph 10 to 25 designs," says Parker. Most companies have turned to outside services to process large quantities of images and get a database started. "It took us about three and a half months of sending out 500 samples per week to really get the database going," explains Godfrey. Another proven solution is to hire interns or temporary workers dedicated to producing images for the database.

Roger Berkley, president of Weave Corp., another producer of jacquard fabrics for the furniture industry, said his company decided to invest in an archiving system for a mundane reason: "We needed more floor space." Swatches had been stored in file cabinets, and with more than 50,000 designs in the archive, the file cabinets were taking over the offices and showroom. "We make better use of our archives, and we're better and faster at reorders now that we can find the swatches quickly and painlessly," he says.

Regardless of the reasons for starting a digital library, companies adopting this technology are now realizing tremendous value from their designs -- which can represent a significant investment.

Alison Hardy is president of Fabri-CAD, a consulting firm specializing in design technology for the textile and apparel industries. Although her offices in Chelmsford, MA, are cluttered with piles of fabric swatches, she tries to encourage better use of new technology at companies around the world. She can be reached at tel.: 978-256-2033 or online at www.fabricad.com.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Miller Freeman, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group