A Novel Standard for Footwear Industrial Machineries

Economic globalization has scattered industrial production, promoting manufacturing models able to chase the most favorable conditions in the widened international scenario. Interorganizational communication becomes thus a critical element for production streamline, being the bridge that creates continuity among industrial districts. However, many sectors still lack proper communication standards, thus slowing the production and increasing its costs. The footwear manufacturing industry especially suffers from this condition, having chronically promoted a plethora of similar-but-incompatible dialects to supply partial data exchange. To regulate and rationalize part of the footwear industry interorganizational communication, in this paper, we present the Shoe PRocess INTeroperability Standard (SPRINTS), conceived and carried out within an industrial district, ranging from shoe design to mass production. SPRINTS is based on the XML standard language to define a data exchange protocol among systems and machines of the footwear production field. SPRINTS describes both "vertical" transfers (i.e., between different steps of the design/production chain), and "horizontal" transfers (e.g., to allow data exchange between CADs from different vendors). Moreover, it allows a smooth transaction from existing standards, and it has been tested in real-world scenarios. SPRINTS is designed in collaboration with ASSOMAC, an association of shoe machineries manufacturers, comprising the worldwide majority of footwear manufacturing companies (http://info.assomac.com). The standard has been validated and already adopted by a few companies, that contributed to its development. In this paper, we present the standard and a tool able to validate and graphically render a SPRINTS file.