Textiles Scotland Fund PhD Research Into Digitalisation In Textiles

Image Courtesy of Bullmer
Last year in a survey, almost 80% of Textile Scotland members said that the growth and success of their business would be through product and process innovation.
To ensure our industry continues to grow and thrive, Textiles Scotland secured funding to support a PhD student at Strathclyde University for the next three years to explore how the textile sector can benefit from digitisation and innovation.
Paulius Stulga began his PhD in October this year. We caught up with him to find out more about the project and how Scottish companies can benefit from his research.
Tell us a bit about yourself:
My name is Paulius Stulga. I am from Lithuania, and for the past nine years I lived in Denmark, where I completed my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering.
My work experience includes working as a production consultant for the Danish Technological Institute in the Centre for Robot Technology.
I also worked as a research assistant for Aalborg University in Denmark. Currently I am working on a PhD at Strathclyde University focused on unlocking the potential of digitalisation in the Scottish textiles industry.
How do you think companies in the textile sector can benefit from digitalisation and innovation?
There are many ways how the textiles sector can benefit from digitalisation. Because of its broad definition, it can mean different things for different companies.
For manufacturers, it will provide more efficient processes and operations, perhaps a more streamlined supply chain.
For retailers, it can bring benefit by finding new ways to interact with their customers, for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) it will bring new smart products.
I understand that not everybody has the same capability to involve themselves into something that is still quite new and still hard to wrap your head around all the buzzwords such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data, but the picture is becoming clearer both in the academic world and in real world.
A lot of different initiatives are being started that help companies learn more about what Industry 4.0 is, and this could help identifying what that means for a particular company.
It is important to identify what is useful for an individual company’s case so that the right tools and technologies can be chosen, especially having in mind their resources as a constraint.
There is so much information and technology out there, it becomes difficult to choose the right path, and more importantly, there is no implementation guide for any specific company with a specific problem in mind.
I think it would be great to show the textiles industry some use cases of Industry 4.0, and describe in practice how can digitalisation be adopted – this will be my focus for the project.
How can textile companies access and benefit from your research?
The end goal is to create a guideline for the textiles industry towards understanding Industry 4.0 better and present some use cases along the way.
Having the next three years to commit to this project, I aim to develop a useful information toolbox and involve the industry as much as possible towards exploiting different Industry 4.0 technologies and concepts.
It will be a great opportunity for the textiles sector to get up-to-date with this buzzword, as well as understanding what it means for their business and how they can benefit from it.
How can Textile Scotland member companies contact you?
I am physically located in the heart of Glasgow at the Design, Manufacture and Engineering Management Department of Strathclyde University.
I am in close contact with the Director of Textiles Scotland, Jaki Love, who provides a lot of support for this project, and could be a point of contact as well.