These shoes are customised and they can be on your doorstep in 24 hours

In a world where internet sales are not the future, but the present, responding quickly to orders is key. The footwear industry went beyond that and developed the Highspeed ShoeFactory, a new solution to produce customised footwear in 24 hours that is already installed and being tested at Kyaia, a factory in Guimarães, Portugal.

Supported by the Compete funding programme as part of the Incentive System for Research and Technological Development, the HighspeedShoeFactory, a model that produces single pairs of shoes, is led by Kyaia, but it was developed together with a set of technology-based companies (CEI – Companhia de Equipamentos Industriais; Flowmat – Sistemas Industriais; Silva e Ferreira and Creativesystems), and science and technology entities, such as the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, the Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering of Porto and the Centro Tecnológico do Calçado de Portugal (Portuguese technological footwear centre).

When explaining the project, the technological centre reveals that the footwear industry is traditionally characterised by production units composed of cutting, seam, assembly and finishing sections which are separated and managed autonomously. “This type of organisation creates several areas of intermediate stocks of products throughout the manufacturing chain, as well as an excess of moving products, materials and people doing activities that do not add value to the products and processes. This causes an impact on delivery times, which generally take several days or even weeks.”

“Designed in a logic of a ‘single section’ that is total flexible and versatile”, the new organisational model “where production occurs in a single flow” replaces the traditional cutting, seam, assembly and finishing sections with “online systems for automatic distribution of the product and process flow”.

This means that with this new technology the position of the work posts in the factory is no longer important as the unit is entirely automated and interconnected by carriers that guarantee the that raw materials and products keep flowing in their different stages.

Fortunato Frederico, founder of Kyaia, is pleased with the results obtained. “It not only makes our layout easier, but also the way we organise our workers, which obviously means we can be more productive. When the troops are organised they can win the battle more quickly”, he stressed.

With an overall eligible investment of 1.491 million Euros, which corresponds to an incentive of 981 thousand Euros, this is just one of the projects developed as part of the ShoeInov, the innovation network for the footwear sector that was in force during the community support framework that is now concluded and made it possible, according to Leandro Melo, general director of the  Centro Tecnológico do Calçado de Portugal, to develop 16 projects, which corresponds to 16.5 million Euros invested and incentives granted close to 11.7 million Euros. The project was developed by 40 companies and about 20 entities from the national science and technology system.

Dinheiro Vivo, 16 February 2014