Created through a joint venture between a 100 years old Italian fabric mill, Tessitura Monti and Aquarelle Clothing, a Mauritius-based company part of CIEL Textiles, Laguna Clothing has a manufacturing setup and systems that are treated as benchmarks by various shirt manufacturers. Bangalore-based Laguna has come a long way from a small manufacturing unit in Jigani with 200 sewing machines, producing 3,200 shirts per day to producing 7,200 shirts per day with 350 sewing machines with a state-of-the-art facility in Kanakpura on the outskirts of Bangalore. The company’s facilities are equipped with all the latest technological solutions from a Richpeace spreader in the cutting room to Juki button sewing and holing indexers in the sewing along with automated collar and cuff pressing machine in the finishing department.
Besides having such an advanced setup, the real niche of Laguna as a shirt manufacturer lies in its modular sewing lines. All orders below 800 pieces are manufactured in the modular sewing line and the rest in its assembly lines. Presently, Laguna has a single modular sewing line producing 150 to 200 shirts per day, but in the coming times, it plans to set up 5 modular sewing lines in the same facility. Handling orders of less than 800 pieces, the line comprises of 19 sewing machines and 16 operators doing at least 2-3 operations individually, but the ratio will reduce further as the operators are still in their learning curve. Due to greater number of operations, the efficiencies are presently not even close to the highest mark achieved in the company’s assembly lines and would increase further once the skill sets are more refined. The improvement is desired in the multi-skill portfolio of the sewing operators, as due to absenteeism the modular line suffers the most as each operator is an integral part of the line doing more than one operation and when all the sewing operators reach the optimum level of multi-skill sewing, the line can be re-balanced with the available operators easily.
The setup of the modular line is U-shaped. While on the periphery are the sewing machines, the ironing tables, button sewing and button holing machines, cuff blocking, collar blocking, rotary fusing and serging machines placed right in the centre from where the final output comes out. To ensure the flexibility of the machine to do a set of operations, attachments like revolving head attached to the presser foots called turret presser foot bar with three different presser foots, can be seen on the floor.
One of the advantages of a modular line is the focus on quick turnaround time in case of small orders and quality rather than speed of operation, due to which the quality is higher and the rejection rate is also very minimal. Since the operators work in standing position, it might be tiring for the operators in the beginning, but they get used to the same with the course of time. Surprisingly there is no supervisor in the modular line, and apart from the sewing operators, there is one quality auditor and maintenance personnel. While the job of the maintenance personnel is to ensure non-stop production, the quality auditor, is only there as a referee, since the modular operation is new. Over the time, he will be released.
