Buying Australian WoolPrint

It is vital for companies to buy, process and manufacture Australian wool efficiently to ensure their continued profitability.

It is therefore advantageous for wool textile mills to have control over, and prior knowledge of, the standard of their wool deliveries. Control over what is bought for the money that is spent, is imperative for the continued success of a wool textile company. Often too much emphasis is placed on buying the greasy wool at the lowest price without considering the negative implications that this might have for efficient processing or consistent product quality.

Buying wool at the best price is a commercial decision but a mill must ensure and possess the knowledge that the wool is appropriate for their needs and that the mill is knowingly extracting the maximum from a particular raw wool combing parcel.

Over-emphasis on price for Australian greasy wool combined with ambiguous or loose buying specifications can result in unwanted variation of the greasy wool which will affect processing efficiency, product quality, profitability and the image of your company.

If variation of the raw material can be reduced through improved control methods, such as buying specifications that truly reflect a company’s product requirements, then machinery speeds, loadings and settings can be established with greater accuracy. This will mean a decrease in downtime, an increase in productivity and product quality, which in turn should result in a higher reputation for the company.

To meet these stringent specifications requires a comprehensive understanding of the properties of the greasy wool, how to select, blend, analyse and effectively and efficiently convert to top at a competitive cost.

It is important in this process the proper wools are selected with the end use in mind. Poor decisions at this stage can have dire consequences in later stages.

To formulate greasy wool buying specifications - in order to minimise variation of the raw material - we must first have a mechanism by which we can determine, with a fair degree of precision, our greasy wool deliveries. One method is to acquire an understanding of objective measurement and the TEAM formulae. The purchase of raw wool with improved buying specifications based on objective measurement has a number of benefits to wool textile mills, these include:

• Potential for detecting abnormal situations in deliveries and minimising those problems
• Improve processing predictions and productivity
• Monitor your capital investment
  
• Monitor combing results

By utilising full objective measurement in your greasy wool buying it is possible to obtain a more precise idea of your future deliveries and to link the purchasing decision with process monitoring and outcomes.

The combing plant needs to fully comprehend the implications of the properties and price of the raw materials purchased and how to set the machinery to obtain the best technical and economical outcome.

To achieve the best results, it is important that the following processes are all properly addressed and action taken by nominated staff where and when necessary:

• Specification of the properties of the greasy wool to meet the requirements of the final top and of the machinery and know-how in the combing plant
• The application of software tools to establish prediction data
• Setting of machinery to gain the most effective and efficient outcomes
• Communicating, and monitoring the processes and gathering the associated data
• Analysing the data, establishing relevant databases and measuring achieved results against world’s best practice as predicted by the mills own suitably modified set of prediction equations

Excellent software packages such as Topmaker and Yarnspec are available to assist in the operations described above and have proved themselves in the industrial environment.

More information:

• The specifications
• TEAM formulae