Leather and Footwear Industry Needs a Push in Digital Technology

According to the General Statistics Office, in 2013 total exports of leather, footwear, bags reached US$10.32 billion, up 18 percent compared to that of 2012, accounting for 11 percent of the total exports in the processing industry and for 7.7 percent of the total exports of the country. Total exports of footwear reached US$8.4 billion, increasing by 15 percent; total exports of handbags, suitcases and briefcases US$1.92 billion, increasing by 26 percent over the same period in 2012. Vietnam is the fifth largest shoe maker and exporter in the world and has the second largest export turnover in some markets such as the U.S., and EU. Despite promising results, the limitations and challenges are remarkable for the industry of leather, shoes, and handbags, as Vietnam integrates deeper into the world economy. In the value chain, Vietnamese enterprises are mainly involved in manual processing phase (70 percent), resulting in limited efficiency and dynamism.

 

Besides, the facts show that many of the shoes companies are using less technical design software for designing, stamping and calculating the costs. Many even measure sizes and form shirt patterns by hand. This process is very time consuming and costly, and the profit is not high.

 

At the workshop, Phan Thi Thanh Xuan, Secretary General of LEFASO said that Vietnam has long manually processed leather products without paying much attention to design software solutions. However, Vietnam has many design experts and if equipped with high-tech techniques such as the design software of Delcam, they may improve their design capabilities.

 

Ms Tina Phung, Sales Engineer of Delcam Vietnam, emphasises that the FDI enterprises involved in this industry have applied the technology of CAD/CAM to shorten the design time, thus helping them to get large orders from the well-known brands and earning high profits. Besides, the application of the latest technologies of 3D and CAD/CAM specialised in the shoe industry will help them to improve their design productivity, reduce time of product development and reach out to the customers and markets faster.

 

In terms of the measurement of cost and price, according to the experts at the workshop, the application of the 3D design software solutions for LastMaker, SoleEngineer, and Shoemaker will also help footwear designing and manufacturing to measure costs and price faster and more accurately, to track and compare the outcomes with the target price, to increase production (more details are placed on the same material), and increase productivity.

 

Specifically, the use of the Lastmaker to create the shoe lasts bring some of benefits such as faster designing, editing and producing of shoes compared with the manual designing, highly interactive editing based on the exact size of digitisation, 3D data exported to the CNC machines to create the forms and specifications of the foot scanned and stored in the software.

 

Designing the sport shoes and shoe soles by the Shoemaker will produce the real images, create the high complexity shoe templates, reduce the disparities in the manufacturing process and create and use the decoration library to design the zippers and laces.

 

At the workshop, Delcam Crispin also introduced the programming of the automatic sewing machine. Given that, the Vietnamese businesses will form the Pallet designs and seam faster and more conveniently, use the digital manufacturing process of the pallet faster than the manual processes, increase the productivity, create and reuse a seam for the boot many times.

 

2014 is considered a good year for the footwear export of Vietnam because of the positive impact from the preferential tariff agreement from key export markets such as the EU, U.S. and ASEAN. In particular, under the framework of the TPP negotiations, along with the textiles, the footwear items may be most beneficial for high volume of exports through the market access opportunities in some markets such as United States and Japan as well as other potential markets such as Canada, Mexico, and Peru.

 

Under the plan, the target export turnover of the footwear and handbags is set out to be at least US$12 billion, an increase of 15 percent compared with that of 2013. And with the application of such advanced digital solutions, the goals would be achieved.