Textiles and garment supply chains are enduring disruption due to the Covid-19 crises. Retailers have not been able to sell products through their bricks and mortar outlets. Supply chains are complex and globally dispersed. Production orders within the supply chains have been cancelled or curtailed, many of the geographic regions have not been able to offer government support for their factories. Manufacturing and Retail have been ranked by Statista as the 1st and 3rd most impacted sectors by Covid-19 in 2020 \[Statista-June-24th-2020\]. Our ecosystem combines both these sectors. Retail Brands create and control the supply chains. The dominant supply chain drivers are digitisation and sustainability. Retail Brands constantly visit their supply chain factories to monitor compliance, quality, delivery schedules, digitisation progress and sustainability processes. Digitisation enables remote monitoring, significantly decreasing their costs and travel carbon footprint. However the sector remains very traditional and labour intensive, so there has been resistance to change. Covid-19 is a catalyst for change, digitisation is accelerating rapidly. The second change driver is environmental sustainability. Most the supply chains are far from the end consumers meaning they are relatively out of sight. Societal awareness and pressure has been limited, however this is changing. Sustainability is now key for all retail brands. Quality Control (termed fabric inspection within the supply chain) is a key factor not only for digitisation, but also decreasing waste (sustainability) and improving yields (sustainability). Traditionally quality control has been very labour intensive and executed inconsistently (subjectively). c-tex and Shelton are global leaders in automated inline colour variation monitoring and defect detection. These are the core functions of fabric inspection. Since 2014 our technologies have been gaining traction among the pioneering textile producers and garment factories, enabling them to automate (digitise) fabric inspection. The sector technical leadership of both companies has already been furthered by InnovateUK to develop their technologies for automated quality checking of patterned fabrics in addition to solid colour fabrics. Therefore factories can now use c-tex and Shelton to digitally quality check their solid colour and patterned fabric. This technological offering is unique to c-tex and Shelton. However due to Covid-19 we now need to automate (digitise) our business model (customer journey). We have had a traditional business model of a face-to-face sales process and long duration onsite user on-boarding (installation, commissioning, training). We now need a non-travel automated customer journey so that our automated technology can be purchased, implemented and used. For our new customer journey we will use readily available remote working technologies where applicable, but we need to develop our proprietary technologies to enable remote installation, commissioning and machine learning. Key to this is to accelerate our AI capabilities for machine learning and self-commissioning of our sensor technologies. We recently started to collaborate at leadership level but we now need to move this onto collaboration between our technical teams. The development of a single interface combining both our technologies is also essential for our new customer journey.

~1-6% of textiles are rejected due to colour variance resulting in costly production delays, customer claims and limiting access to the emerging & rapidly developing retailer market for dynamic stock management. Existing quality control methods are primarily off-line inspection of physical samples which are slow, inspect <0.25% of the textile and result in costly product waste. Whilst online spectrophotometer inspection systems exist, they are not widely adopted due to cost and inability to process patterned textiles. Building on a recently launched MEMS sensor technology and through the adoption of a novel digital technology approach, the project will develop a market first solution for real time online continuous and complete colour inspection of patterned textiles. The system will result in colour data roll maps enabling quality assurance, grouping of rolls based on similarity of colour, and advanced production planning. System development and testing will be undertaken in collaboration with two UK textile manufacturers. The new solution will lead to step changes in competitiveness and productivity for UK manufacturing: i) competitive advantage against discounted bulk manufacture abroad through the offer of ‘fast, small batch production with minimal errors’ addressing emerging retailer needs; and ii) enhanced productivity through application for mid-process quality control ensuring value is only added to correctly coloured materials thereby increasing first time yield (manufacturing capacity) and reducing process costs. The technology is also transferable to other sectors including plastics, packaging films & coatings

These have to be unrolled and re-rolled by machines to give the correct stretch prior to automatic cutting. This presents an ideal opportunity for automatic scanning to detect colour variation before machines cut pieces that workers sew into a finished garment. We have demonstrated added value to both garment manufacturers and fabric dyers and printers. We sell slightly different versions of our technology to these two groups of customers. Our current system has been adapted to swimwear and lingerie and we now want to diversify into other fabric types. We have identified several different fabric types, for which C-tex colour could improve manufacturing processes. Each will need specific adjustments to hardware and software of the core technology. The purpose of this study is to identify: Which sectors will benefit most from colour variation monitoring? How large each of those sectors are; i.e. are they worth us developing variants for? What technical adjustments do we need to make, and how much will it cost to develop a prototype for these? Ours is a market worth £120Bn worldwide, growing at a CAGR of 14.02%. We export 90% of our products, adding to the £5bn of exports that textiles contributes to UK exports and £37Bn to the UK economy overall.

c-tex colour handheld configuration is a technology that allows users to quickly and objectively determine if their product colour has variance from standard. This enables users to control their production streams more efficiently, removes inertia from production flows and replaces a previously labour intensive activity.