Textile industry glossary
Plain-English definitions of textile manufacturing, quality, compliance, and technology terms.
Compliance
Yarn Forward Rule
Yarn Forward is a rule of origin requirement — for a garment to qualify for preferential tariffs under agreements like USMCA, the yarn must be produced within member countries.
RoDTEP Scheme
RoDTEP (Remission of Duties and Taxes on Exported Products) is an Indian export incentive scheme that reimburses exporters for embedded taxes not refunded elsewhere.
UFLPA (Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act)
UFLPA is US legislation that presumes goods made in China's Xinjiang region, or linked to Uyghur forced labor, are produced with forced labor and banned from US import.
Inventory
Fabric Roll
A fabric roll is the standard shipping unit for textile fabric, typically 50-150 meters. Each roll has unique attributes: dye lot, shade, GSM, width.
WMS (Warehouse Management System)
A warehouse management system (WMS) controls the physical movement and storage of stock inside a warehouse: where each item is located, how it is put away, how it is picked, and how it is counted. In textiles it has to work at roll and lot level rather than SKU level, because two rolls of the same fabric with different dye lots are not interchangeable stock.
Production
Dye Lot
A dye lot is a batch of fabric or yarn dyed together in a single cycle. Each lot has slight shade variations that must be tracked for order consistency.
OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness)
OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) combines availability, performance and quality into a single percentage that expresses how much of a machine's theoretical output you actually captured as good product.
Loom Scheduling
Loom scheduling is the process of assigning weaving orders to specific looms based on fabric construction, capacity, and changeover cost.
Production Planning (Textile)
Textile production planning coordinates orders through spinning, weaving, dyeing, finishing, and cutting, with machine-specific constraints at each stage.
CMT vs FOB (Garment Manufacturing)
CMT and FOB are the two dominant garment manufacturing models. CMT = Cut-Make-Trim (the factory supplies labour only). FOB = Free on Board (the factory supplies materials and labour, and sells finished goods).
MRP (Material Requirements Planning)
MRP (Material Requirements Planning) is the calculation that turns a production plan into a list of what to buy and when. It explodes each order through its bill of materials, subtracts what is already in stock or on order, and offsets the shortfall by supplier lead time to produce purchase and production dates.
BOM (Bill of Materials)
A bill of materials (BOM) is the structured list of every material needed to make one unit of a product, with the quantity of each. In garment and textile manufacturing a BOM is not a flat list but a matrix, because material requirements change with colour and size, and fabric is consumed by length or weight with a wastage allowance rather than as a fixed count.
Shop Floor Control
Shop floor control is the set of activities that release work to the factory floor, track its progress through each operation, and report actual output, downtime and quality back to the plan. It is the point where a production schedule stops being a document and becomes an instruction to a specific machine and operator.
Batch Production
Batch production makes a group of units together as one lot, through one process cycle, before the next group starts. In textiles it is the defining mode of wet processing: dyeing, bleaching, washing and finishing all run as batches sized to the machine, which is why the size of the machine — not the size of the order — often decides what a metre of fabric costs.
Capacity Planning
Capacity planning determines whether a factory can actually produce what it has promised, by comparing the work in the order book against the productive capacity of its machines and lines over time. In textiles the constrained resources are specific and unforgiving — looms of a given width and type, dye vats of a given volume, sewing lines with a given operator skill mix — and changeover time between jobs is often as significant as the run time itself.
SAM / SMV (Standard Allowed Minutes)
SAM (Standard Allowed Minutes), also called SMV (Standard Minute Value), is the time a qualified operator working at a standard pace should take to complete an operation or a whole garment, including allowances for fatigue and unavoidable delay. It is the base unit of garment costing, line balancing, capacity planning and operator incentive schemes.
Quality
GSM (Grams per Square Meter)
GSM (grams per square metre) measures fabric weight per unit area. It is the textile industry's primary metric for classifying fabric density, and it determines how a fabric drapes, wears, costs and is graded.
4-Point Inspection System
The 4-point system grades fabric quality by assigning penalty points for defects based on length and severity. It's the textile industry's standard quality method.
Shade Matching
Shade matching is the process of ensuring consistent color across different dye lots, rolls, or production runs using spectrophotometer readings.
Lot Traceability
Lot traceability is the ability to follow a specific batch of material forwards and backwards through every stage of production — from the yarn lot it was spun from, through the dye lot and fabric roll, to the garments and cartons it ended up in. In textiles it exists to protect shade continuity, to isolate the blast radius of a quality failure, and to produce evidence for customs and compliance audits.
Sustainability
Higg Facility Environmental Module (FEM)
Higg FEM is the sustainable apparel industry's standard tool for measuring facility environmental performance across water, energy, chemicals, waste, and emissions.
ESG Reporting (Textiles)
ESG reporting documents a textile business's environmental, social, and governance performance. Required by EU CSRD, UK SECR, India BRSR, and major buyers.
Technology
Textile ERP
Textile ERP is enterprise resource planning software purpose-built for textile manufacturing, trading, and distribution — covering operations generic ERPs can't.
MES (Manufacturing Execution System)
A Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is the software layer that tracks and controls production as it happens on the factory floor, between the plan an ERP issues and the finished goods it receives back. It records what each machine and operator is doing in real time, tracks work in progress through each operation, and feeds actual production data back to the planning system.
Barcode & RFID Tracking
Barcode and RFID are the two dominant ways of giving a physical object a machine-readable identity so that its movement can be recorded without manual data entry. In a textile plant the tagged objects are fabric rolls, yarn cones, cut bundles, garments and cartons, and the tag's job is to carry an identity that resolves to a lot, a shade, a length and a location.