Students develop a prototype for AI to enhance fabric quality control at Katty Fashion

Alexandra Popa, Business Development Consultant at Katty Fashion, participated as a mentor in the Teaching Factories Competition 2024 focusing on Deep Tech solutions for the manufacturing industry. Alexandra guided the students in this creative process as they worked in Solver Teams on tackling the business challenges faced by Katty Fashion, a Romanian company specialising in textile manufacturing.

Alexandra reflected on her experience in the Teaching Factories Competition, highlighting the importance of collaboration and the tangible outcomes that were achieved. The Teaching Factories Competition serves to bridge the gap between industry and academia, fostering innovative solutions for European manufacturing.

Tackling fabric quality control with AI

Katty Fashion’s challenge focused on exploring artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to enhance fabric quality control (QC) processes, particularly at the reception stage.

Students worked in a Solver Team on a solution to address key fabric defects such as folds, spots and holes. Katty Fashion provided a library of defects, while the Solver Team of students annotated the data manually, applied data augmentation techniques and trained an AI/ML model. This partnership culminated in a prototype tailored to automate fabric quality checks—an innovation that would typically require substantial time, resources and expertise to achieve independently.

From industry challenge to a new business solution

For Katty Fashion, participating in the Teaching Factories Competition 2024 was a game-changer. “The Teaching Factories Competition eliminated a lot of risk from exploratory activities and gave us access to key knowledge that would have otherwise been hard to obtain,” highlighted Alexandra Popa.

The collaborative environment fostered creativity and reduced the financial and operational risks often associated with adopting new technologies. The benefits extended to students, who gained hands-on experience tackling real-world industry challenges. “Without the team, this solution wouldn’t have been possible, so their impact was really a big one,” stressed Alexandra Popa looking back at the dedication of students to the company challenge.

“We developed a great solution for our problem in just a few weeks,” said Alexandra Popa. By leveraging AI/ML, the prototype has the potential to optimise quality checks, saving time and resources while ensuring consistent product standards.

While the solution is in its early stages, the prototype holds significant promise for streamlining fabric quality control processes.

Win-win collaboration

For Katty Fashion, the experience reaffirmed the value of partnering with academia through initiatives like the Teaching Factories Competition.

As Katty Fashion continues to explore the feasibility of implementing the prototype, the competition stands as a testament to how academia-industry collaborations can drive innovation and create a meaningful impact in the European manufacturing industry.

Exploring new opportunities for industry-academia collaboration

The Teaching Factories Competition 2025 is open for companies, startups, SMEs and social enterprises to submit their industry challenges across advanced, green and digital transformation of the manufacturing industry. The application closes on 26 February 2025, 17:00 CET.

EIT Manufacturing invites companies to explore the opportunity of working with students to turn complex challenges into a new solution ready to scale.