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www.ADandP.media AD&P; ∕ SEPTEMBER 2016 QUALITY Although more and more OEMs have leather trim packages for vehicles at all levels, you might be surprised to learn about how some of that material is processed. The Versalis cutting system from Lectra displays the status of the machine, current orders in process and leather hides being processed. Sensors scan the fabric's surface and find the optimal path for cutting by recognizing defects. Defects are categorized on four levels of defect-coding and visualized by four colors. This allows greater use of the leather. BY GARY S. VASILASH, Editor-In-Chief Roy Shurling spends a lot of time traveling. He's visiting OEMs. Tier ones. And tanners. As in leather tanners, not people on the Cote d'Azur. Shurling is the global automotive business development leader for Lectra ( lectra.com ), a company that specializes in software, CAD/CAM equipment and services for industries that use materials including fabrics, textiles and leather (so in addition to automotive, for example, the company also deals with fashion and apparel). Shurling says that he's presently involved in helping transform the supply chain for leather— from the tanner of hides to the tier one suppliers that are producing the seats or other pieces of interior trim to the OEM—to a digital one. Part of this drive is predicated on the fact that in Germany, he notes, Industry 4.0 is a big movement toward digitizing manufacturing across the board. (When you think of OEMs that use an extensive amount of leather in their interiors, you undoubtedly think of German vehicle manufacturers.) And another is from a quality perspective: things like seats can be designed better and the hides can be cut more precisely. Shurling says that while computer-aided design tools are a matter of course for things like exterior vehicle designs, this is not the norm in leather seat design. He explains that for seats it is often a matter of a designer creating a prototype artifact—a clay or foam model—and then literally draping fabric over the model on the way to developing the seat. "It is a very tedious process and they have to go back and forth to find the right fit," he says. Their alternative is a 3D design system that can conduct feasibility studies (taking into account the leather properties) to get a first cover much faster and more accurately. "The software can show where to change the location of the seams to get better quality, and it can show you how to change the patterns to save cost—through nesting it is common to find a 10 to 15 percent improvement on cost," Shurling points out. The number of companies that do this? A couple of OEMs, he answers. "There's a lot of oppor- tunity to improve quality in the early part of the design cycle," he says. (On the subject of time, Shurling adds that if the task is to develop an entire interior—wrapping everything from the seats to the steering wheel to the IP to the door trim—in leather, the software can save from four to six weeks in development time.) Shurling suggests that some pushback to using the software is from those who think that the craftsman is being taken out of the process. He counters that the design software is just a tool: "When it is doing the feasibility it shows the strain and the stress and where the wrinkles are going to be. But it doesn't fix it. It will tell you where they will be. Somebody has to say they can move a seam or cut a pattern differently to get the stress out." One of the particular quality challenges of designing and 21