Suit factory borrows Toyota's methods

The team and the union were asked to embrace the Japanese concept of continuous improvement.
NEW BEDFORD, MASS. (AP) -- The two might seem as unlikely together as a hand-stitched double-breasted suit jacket with a pair of work pants: Anthony Sapienza, the son of a factory manager, and Warren Pepicelli, who grew up on the union side, pounding the pavement as a business agent in Boston, walking from one of the city's 60 women's garment factories to another.
But Sapienza, president of the Joseph Abboud suit factory, and Pepicelli, who runs its union, are working hand in glove.
Union and management are collaborating to revamp timeworn garment-making methods in favor of manufacturing techniques pioneered at Toyota Motor Corp. Their goal: survival in the face of cheaper foreign competitors.
The U.S. garment manufacturing industry has bled jobs for decades, as work moved first to cheaper labor in Mexico, then to Asia. As Chinese manufacturing becomes increasingly skilled and sophisticated, the few U.S. factories that remain are vulnerable, and their managers know it.
How it's changed
Sapienza and Pepicelli both have about 30 years in the business. Sapienza, who spent his boyhood Saturdays sweeping cuttings in his family's menswear factory, then wrestling his brother in the pile of scraps, remembers when there were 40,000 U.S. workers making men's clothing. Now there are 4,000, he said.
For Pepicelli, the days when he could stand on a street corner in Boston and look up at row after row of women sewing in second-floor factories are just a memory. Every one of those factories is closed.
"An industry can go away, it can leave this country," said Pepicelli, international vice president of the union UNITE HERE. "It can become extinct."
That's what everyone at Abboud's sprawling skylighted brick factory, built as a cotton mill around the time of the Civil War, is working to avoid. And if anyone forgets what's at stake, they need only drive down the street, where the Cliftex menswear mill that used to employ more than 2,000 workers sits, its windows boarded.
Abboud has hired the best workers from its failed neighbors, managers there say. The city lost 67 percent of its manufacturing jobs during the 40 years ending in 2000, according to the Brookings Institute. For many of the factory's workers, Sapienza said, "This is the one opportunity they have to continue to work."
The push for change comes from Marty Staff, president and chief executive officer of JA Apparel Corp. Staff and private equity company J.W. Childs bought the company in 2004; the brand's founder, Joseph Abboud, left in 2005.
Advantages to staying
Keeping Abboud's suit manufacturing in the United States has advantages, such as reduced shipping time, Staff said. He also thinks overseas workers can't beat the quality and price of the suits Abboud produces in New Bedford, which sell in Nordstrom Inc. and Bloomingdale's for 700 to 1,000.
Abboud says its sales are about 400 million a year. While the company is doing fine, management says the U.S. factory has to improve constantly to justify the higher salaries its workers make compared to foreign competitors.
The average wage in the factory is 12 an hour, plus union benefits. That's three or four times what workers in Mexico make, Sapienza said.
But if the workers in New Bedford could make suits faster, the advantages would be even greater. Then the company could restock a successful style at stores in season -- it could get fresh winter suits to shoppers in late January, for instance, if a store had run out of a size or a color. It could introduce the "fast fashions" that stores such as H & amp;M and Zara sell -- edgier styles that arrive every month, then are swiftly replaced.
Finally, the company could make made-to-measure suits more quickly. The suits take 10 working days to manufacture; the goal is to make them in three.
Read about Toyota
To speed production and cement the factory's edge over foreign workers, Staff, who spent about two years as acting CEO of Penthouse Brand Management, read up on Toyota, poring over the book "The Machine that Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production."
He asked Sapienza, his team and the union to embrace Toyota principles, including kaizen, a Japanese word meaning continuous improvement.
The union agreed. Pepicelli said, "It's an answer, but not a total answer."
The real problem, he said, "is an unlevel playing field; the competition from overseas makes it very difficult to be efficient and competitive."
The company is asking workers at the factory -- half of whom speak only Portuguese or Spanish and many of whom never finished high school -- to abandon the "piecework" method of making suits, in which every worker does only one task, and move to team-based work.
It's also asking workers to speak up at kaizen meetings, voicing their opinions on how they can do their jobs better. It's a big change at the factory, whose previous owners were strictly hierarchical.
"I can remember people coming to me and asking for permission to speak," said Sapienza.
The average wage on the teams is still 12 an hour, plus benefits, and there are shared bonuses if the team beats its quota, or makes its quota faster. Individuals with additional skills, or those who have trained to do more than one job, are paid a higher wage. The hourly goals are laid out on a chart near the team. A green dot by an hour means the team has hit its goals, a red dot means it's missed.
Gabriela Rodriguez, 50, of New Bedford, has been working in garment factories for 28 years, 10 of them at Joseph Abboud and is on the first team the company started. She likes it, she said. "I'm not under the pressure of piecework."
Sapienza, a tall, courtly man in an elegant suit, is hopeful.
"It's one thing to do it in 2007," he said. "Are we going to be able to do it in 2010? In 2012?... In the final analysis, if Toyota can make a car in 13 hours, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to make a suit in a much reduced period of time."