Linli Cao

Facing the need of sustainability integration from consumer to factory in footwear, it is important for enterprises to use information technology to improve the collaborative efficiency among customers, product design, procurement, and production.

In the 2018 UITIC conference in Portugal, Spain, we spoke about mass footwear customization supported by a blueprint of digital transformation framework. We bring to the table this time a software application prototype using this framework to support sustainability integration.

We will show that sustainable material identification, global sourcing and usage in footwear design and development can be reviewed through a few mouse clicks. We will demo a material usage dashboard which can provide timely and comprehensive analysis of the material data used in the enterprise's product development process from multiple dimensions.

The benefits of implementing such a solution include clarity in the usage of materials in global product development through comprehensive reports and graphic analysis to the level of SKU or source variants in supplier selection, inventory optimization, and reduction if not elimination of non-sustainable materials, with transparency of development costs, plus, by expanding the integration scope, this component can aggregate massive material data as training data for AI algorithms that prioritize material and supplier selection serving supply chain optimization and decision-making.

We are confident that with the Internet of Thing technology coupled with the best breed PLM solution in the world as the integration backbone, sustainability related processes and people can be easily integrated and transformed into new normal.