Hugo Boss has deployed artificial intelligence and tablets at its production facility in Turkey. The 65,000 sq. mt. factory with around 4000 employees is reimagining the ways humans and machines interact. The factory produces as many as 9,00,000 suits annually, as well as two million shirts and 5,50,000 pieces of women’s apparel. The plant has also started to deliver single piece orders to pilot stores in Asia. In time the plant will be developed as a platform for products, services, and knowledge.
Between shifts, workers have to clean up workplaces and unplug machines. When it was first implemented, the process would take 40 minutes, whereas now it’s cut down to only five or ten. The flexible shifts enable faster adaptation to fluctuations in demand for the numerous product groups that are made at the plant.
Over 1,600 tablets are used on the shop floor, allowing mistakes to be immediately flagged to the colleague who worked on the previous step where the error was made in the production line, reducing the number of follow-up mistakes. By noticing and acting on the mistake the worker can choose to rehearse the task with the help of a mixed reality game that was developed for the factory. Over 1,000 operations have been taught with the help of a virtual dojo.
