More quality, more quantity!

Today's textile markets are highly competitive throughout the value chain, from fibre to fabric. Customers have very precise quality expectations and mills must use their resources efficiently to meet these quality requirements. To meet these challenges, the Swiss company Uster Technologies AG has taken the step from machine manufacturer to service provider with the aim of offering its customers comprehensive quality management and smooth production.

This is where Centigrade came in!

To produce a T-shirt of a certain quality, a specific mix of different materials must be used. Even small deviations can lead to unsatisfactory results, so precision is crucial. An algorithm simplifies this process by analysing the data collected by the machines. Previously, the data was transferred manually to large Excel spreadsheets, but thanks to FiberQ, this is now done automatically in the cloud!

Complex data requiring specialist knowledge has been replaced by an easy-to-understand, guided process. Factories can now ensure consistent quality and smooth production without the need for in-depth textile knowledge on the part of the operator.

Fewer faulty production processes means less production waste. Quality management with FiberQ can reduce quality defects and wastage, which in turn enables more sustainable production. In addition, linking data on the raw material measured, its growing area, fibre type and origin enables better traceability within the mill – from raw material to finished product.

The collaboration with Uster Technologies went very well, even though the project started during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is mainly due to our agile working processes. This allowed our Centigrade team to seamlessly integrate into Uster's SAFe-based development process and work within their management framework. SAFe stands for Scaled Agile Framework and coordinates, among other things, the synchronisation when several agile teams work on the same system at the same time.

For front-end development, we rely heavily on Angular to ensure the most flexible software architecture possible. As Uster uses a variety of applications, we have developed a comprehensive app shell that acts as a framework for integrating different micro front-ends. These are loaded independently, allowing development teams, for example, to work on different software components in parallel. This also makes the software easy and flexible to extend. An example of such micro-frontends are the tabs for mail and calendar in Microsoft Outlook.

To make collaboration between design and software engineering seamless, we have developed a plugin that can automatically convert Figma design tokens into CSS style definitions and export them as a JSON file. This means that changes to designers' basic style definitions, such as colour palettes, font definitions and spacing, can be automatically incorporated into applications!

FiberQ is only the beginning of a comprehensive service system. To provide customers with comprehensive solutions to the complex challenges of cotton processing, Uster is developing the 360Q platform with our support. This cloud-based platform integrates various services, including FiberQ, and forms the basis for our continued close collaboration.

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We are proud to be part of such a global project with participants from all over the world that has worked so well despite the challenges of the pandemic!