Innovation and automation: the way to meet future challenges in spinning Sivakumar Narayanan, Executive Vice President within Uster Technologies, talks about the current state of the industry and its needs. He sees automation as a key solution and assesses the impact of future changes on spinning mills.
TEXtalks: Which do you see as the key future challenges in spinning?
Sivakumar Narayanan: A challenge and a key constraint is the reducing availability of experienced textile managers. Margins are also truly challenging, due to overcapacity or matching demand.
TEXtalks: What would be your advice to cope with these challenges?
Sivakumar Narayanan: The industry is compelled to become more flexible and more productive – and it’s essential to improve quality.
TEXtalks: How do you believe this could best be achieved?
Sivakumar Narayanan: We see that structurally mills will consolidate and become larger and more vertical. With fewer people and less experience, the only successful path forward is more automation. These solutions are decision support tools that save time and yet enable better decisions and shortest possible reaction times.
TEXtalks: What changes will come with a higher level of automation in mills?
Sivakumar Narayanan: If some early adopters are any indication, operators will become more skilled in future. The traditionally limited role of the operator – primarily related to productivity targets – will shift. Operators will have to become more empowered, learning and becoming capable of handling tools. Such tools attract educated staff, as they offer more challenging tasks and make work more interesting. In other words, they take on more responsibilities from the supervisor roles. Meanwhile the supervisors have to step up as well to manage the process. For some years, Uster has recognized that management structures will become more fluid and people will have multiple roles to manage, rather than the traditional silos. This applies equally to all levels in the mill. The Uster News Bulletin No. 50, titled `Managing a spinning mill with quality in mind´, emphasized this trend.
TEXtalks: So where does that leave innovators like Uster?
Sivakumar Narayanan: We have to actually create this future. We recognize that and want to enable those future structures in the mill. That’s why we continually state that quality is not a one-dimensional aspect to be managed. It is tightly connected to every other aspect. You can’t make a better quality yarn just by using good machines and equipment. You also need better raw material, with a laydown that matches end-user requirements. You need the quality of the fiber and the machine settings to be matched. You need waste levels adapted to the expected quality. And you need production to be adapted to quality needs. So quality is tied to every key decision: raw material choices, speeds, waste, machine settings to be used etc. This complex understanding of data points helps us to build the future and help the modern mills to shape their future.
TEXtalks: So innovations must focus on how making the right decisions?
Sivakumar Narayanan: The innovation part is to produce fact-based decisions and practical advice from data – through smart analysis combined with application intelligence. Uster Quality Expert is advancing further in that direction every year. Just look at the progress we made in the past 12 months, despite the Covid disruption.
TEXtalks: What are your future plans?
Sivakumar Narayanan: Uster wants to stand alongside our textile industry colleagues. We want to learn from them, and apply that learning to enable textile managers to make the right quality-based decisions through automated tools.
