Tailor-made customized solutions
COTTON USA SOLUTIONS®: Mill Mastery™ Course
COTTON USA Technical Team with a combined experience of over 200 years, conducted Mill Mastery™ Course at Tata Textile Mills, Pakistan.
From the king of the cotton world, COTTON USA SOLUTIONS® consultancy is famous for helping textile related startups in over 50 countries turn into proper businesses by lending a helping hand through their expertise, modern technical solutions and techniques. Moreover, they are back with a one-of-a-kind initiative which is a 3-day training Mill Mastery™ Course. Two of these workshops were held at Tata Textile Mills (Muzaffargarh) and Ellcot Spinning Mills (Raiwand). The Mill Mastery courses, by CCI, were a wonderful experience which has given an opportunity to the mills’ management teams to learn about the advantages of using the USA cotton and how to utilize the US cotton in the best way, in Pakistan’s environment.
Adeel Shahid Tata, Director of Tata Textile Mills expressed his gratitude by addressing “First of all, I am very thankful to Mazhar Mirza and COTTON USA™ team for a successful Mill Mastery program. It’s a great initiative that CCI has started which will help our team to learn and understand how to improve the processes in the mill with the better usage of USA cotton. The Mill Mastery™ Course has helped us to clear out a lot of issues that my team had regarding US cotton and hopefully they will now be able to make a better use of it to get quality yarn. The mill audits again are good initiative by CCI which helped us to improve our own benchmark. After having primarily discussion with our team, we have taken out few points and hopefully we will further improve our process.”
CCI’s global technical teams are the foundation of this new program which is designed to help customers of US cotton get the maximum performance from US cotton fibre. The Mill Mastery™ Course presently includes five modules designed to offer tailor-made customized solutions for the US cotton customers. COTTON USA SOLUTIONS® also feature mill studies, technical seminars, 1:1 mill consults, and CCI’s Mill Exchange Program.
Joerg Bauersachs, Head of CCI’s Technical Services explained “we from CCI, are always there for our customers. We are supporting our representatives and licenses in the respective markets. We have developed a new campaign called “COTTON USA SOLUTIONS®” which comprises of five different offerings including the Mill Mastery™ Course. These all are complementary for our customers as long as they meet two criteria: (1) the mill should be a COTTON USA licensee, and (2) the mill should be a member of the new US Cotton Trust Protocol program, the US cotton industry’s new sustainability program for US cotton.”
Upon asking about what roles the modules play in the Mill Program, Joerg said, “We having training modules starting with cotton growing, harvesting, cotton buying and fiber quality then we go through the entire process starting from the blow room all the way down to winding. We also have included a module about industrial engineering, profitability, economics of spinning that all comes totally free of charge.
Depending on the needs of our customers, we are also going to customize a tailor-made course for our customers that can be in person or virtual.”
Coming to the technical management side of the Tata Textile Mills, Hafiz Imran Aslam, the Vice president also had a few words to say about this training program, “It was very good experience and most importantly, for the Mill Mastery™ Course, all the team members of Tata Pakistan belonging to cotton buying, mills management and the technical team sit together and having a common understanding on all the parameters to produce different quality yarns like knitting, weaving and denim. This is important specially in the days, where the profitability of a mill is very crucial for everyone.”
A few members from the technical management department of Tata Mills also gave their insights and reviews about the training program. Adnan Alam, Senior Vice President Salfi Textile Mills explained, “It was very informative, and we have learned a lot and the course extends as per our scope. The Mill Mastery course will help us to improve recovery, strength and yarn quality. We have learned many new things with full of quality information. Micronaire, maturity levels, neps and how to manage seed-coat fragments and were very useful sessions. CCI needs to advertise this more so that everybody could get relevant benefit from it.”
Muhammad Sehban, Vice President of Island Textile Mills discussed how this program can strengthen our cotton practices. “This is a very good initiative by the CCI of having a mill mastery course. We will give some suggestions to them as well, if they add some practical examples of this course that they have given us of advantages of using the USA Cotton. This will further add very organized course. The most interesting chapter of this mill mastery course for me was about “short fiber” and how to use short fiber to our advantage. The second subject that I loved was about “stickiness” in the cotton and how to check for it and manage it in our processing”.
Adeel Tata thinks that USCTP is a good initiative but it’s becoming a little confusing, as the brands are also taking their own initiatives. He said that right now, we have BCI, Inditex, GOTS, OEKO-TEX, Primark, CMI etc. He thinks its overall the same thing and if everybody gets together and comes under one umbrella it will be easier for entire chain to be able to practices.
The future of Pakistan’s textile industry seems very bright, especially with the government policies being on the right track. The textile and garment industries must move with the times especially given the challenges of fast fashion, decreased garment prices, and thin margins throughout the value chain. Pakistan is a great position to build on our strengths and benefit from the global issues such as the US taking a hard stand on China, Xinjiang cotton and their practices with the people of Xinjiang; the US and other European brands now want to move out of China.
As they moved out of China, hopefully, Pakistan can take a bigger share along with India, Vietnam and Bangladesh.
While discussing Pakistan’s cotton and export market, Adeel said, “As improvement is a continuous process, that’s what we strive for here in Tata Pakistan, I hope we can keep on improving and expanding gradually. More we expand, will be a bigger market for US cotton as my Father and I am the biggest champions of US cotton. Overall US cotton is the best cotton.
Many customers are already shifted to Pakistan and I think, it’s just a start. If we can give them the right services, with the right quality and right price, I don’t think they will be moving back. Everyone is getting up for major expansions and I hope that Pakistan can grow in the textile field.”
The hard work and the efforts of the Pakistan’s spinning industry left a mark on Joerg Bauersachs as he said, “The spinning industry in Pakistan is mature as they started in the fifties and during all this time the industry has developed strategies and technologies. I have seen the mills are running at the highest speeds with low ends down on the machines, with very low cut levels on the winders. I have travelled to many countries and visited many mills. Here I see that Pakistani products are excellent quality yarn and have high profitability.
I am really impressed.”
After these Mill Mastery™ Course, Mills management have now better understanding regarding cotton parameters which effects the yarn quality and obviously fabric appearance. This was a very good initiative from CCI specially in these crucial days keeping in view Covid-19. CCI evaluates everything they do, and one recommendation was to continue these programs and add more features in the coming days.
