A research project was conducted to determine which lean principles are appropriate for implementation in the textile industry. Lean manufacturing involves a variety of principles and techniques, all of which have the same ultimate goal: to eliminate waste and non-value-added activities at every production or service process in order to give the most satisfaction to the customer. To stay competitive, many US textile manufacturers have sought to improve their manufacturing processes so that they can more readily compete with overseas manufacturers. This study identifies the different tools and principles of lean. The use of lean manufacturing in the textile industry was examined in this research through interviews, plant tours and case studies. A model for implementing lean tools and principles in a textile environment was developed.

A procedure is developed for the simultaneous scheduling of multi-factory supply chains, including inter-factory transportation. A job-shop scheduling procedure, known to provide near-optimal solutions to industrial-sized problems, is enhanced to include transportation elements in the fundamental model. In order to demonstrate the quality of the solutions, a lower bound calculation is compared to the procedure's solutions on a number of large-scale test problems. The lower bound is an enhancement of the classic lower bound calculation for the N-job, M-machine job shop. The computational effort in scheduling is linear in the size of the problem, and high quality solutions to large-scale problems can be obtained in seconds.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study clothing and shoes disposal behavior of US consumers in an attempt to understand how to divert more clothing and shoes from the landfill. Design/methodology/approach: A survey was administered to 209 consumers from the general US population. The survey includes questions on demographics, methods of disposal and factors that motivate or prevent consumers from choosing methods other than throwing unwanted clothing in the trash. Findings: Analysis of demographic data from the survey indicates that gender, income, marital status, living arrangement and type of dwelling have an effect on whether consumers recycle textiles. Other survey results indicate that helping factors are more influential in motivating consumers to recycle clothing and shoes than economic factors. The condition of clothes and shoes and lack of awareness are the most prominent reasons preventing consumers from recycling more textiles. The results also show that there are statistically significant differences between households with and without children when it comes to disposing adults’ clothing and shoes. Originality/value: These results may help policymakers who want to motivate consumers to recycle or develop recycling programs.

We treat the two-machine flowshop problem with the objective of minimizing the expected makespan when the jobs possess stochastic durations of arbitrary distributions. We make three contributions in this paper: (1) we propose an exact approach with exponential worst-case time complexity. We also propose approximations which are computationally modest in their requirements. Experimental results indicate that our procedure is within less than 1 % of the optimum; and (2) we provide a more elementary proof of the bounds on the project completion time based on the concepts of ‘control networks’; and (3) we extend the ‘reverse search’ procedure of Avis and Fukuda [1[ to the context of permutation schedules.