The Role of Emerging Digital Technologies in the Apparel Industry of Pakistan

Abstract Purpose: Current study examines the relationship of industry 4.0 on firm performance through process mediation of employee involvement and mass customization capabilities. The motivation to conduct the current study was driven by the decreasing trend of Pakistan apparel exports and the inconsistent findings in the literature on the relationship among variables. Design/Methodology/Approach: Population of the study are the export members firms of HS code 61 and HS code 62 apparel manufacturing firms. From 1564 firms 10000 senior and middle management identified as a population. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the research model. Findings: The results reveal that industry 4.0 technologies positively impacted firm performance. Study findings also show the process mediation of employee involvement and mass customization capability between big data and firm performance. Implication/Originality/Value: To the best author's knowledge, this is the first attempt to examine the process mediation of employee involvement and mass customization capability on the relationship between industry 4.0 and Pakistan apparel firm performance

Automatic Virtual Metrology and Target Value Adjustment for Mass Customization

[[abstract]]One of the core values of Industry 4.0 targets to integrate people's demand into manufacturing for enhanced products, systems, and services for a wider variety of increasingly personalized customization of products. Thus, Industry 4.0 advances the traditional manufacturing techniques from mass production toward mass customization (MC). Take wheel machining automation (WMA) as an example. To meet MC expectations, manufacturers should offer customized wheels at a large scale with low cost, short lead-time, and high quality. Thus, WMA cells with MC capability are requested to be designed to have a high degree of quick responsiveness to accurately react on machining-condition changes for manufacturing different wheel types. To meet the requirements of MC production, this work proposes to apply the automatic virtual metrology (AVM) system together with the so-called target-value-adjustment (TVA) scheme. The AVM system was developed by the authors to convert sampling inspections with metrology delay into real-time and on-line total inspection, while the TVA scheme is designed to enhance AVM's adaptive customization capability for automatically and rapidly accomplishing the goals of MC production. To demonstrate the versatility of the AVM-plus-TVA approach, the other example in semiconductor etching process is also illustrated