Coats Digital is pleased to announce that Ansell Textile Lanka (Pvt) Ltd., part of the global personal protective equipment leader, Ansell (ASX: ANN), has significantly improved manufacturing consistency and productivity through the implementation of its GSDCost solution. The company has successfully reduced style-based Standard Minute Values (SMV) by up to 7%, achieved a 7% improvement in productivity within its Body Protection division, and is now well-positioned to accommodate increasing capacity demands using existing resources.

Ansell Textile Lanka, part of global PPE leader Ansell, boosted productivity by 7 per cent and reduced SMVs by up to 7 per cent after implementing Coats Digital’s GSDCost solution.
The tool standardised methods, improved costing accuracy, and enhanced transparency across teams, enabling scalable, efficient production and data-driven decision-making.

Ansell is a global leader in safety solutions and an integrated manufacturer of personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare and industrial workplaces. With 14 manufacturing sites and operations in over 100 countries, Ansell delivers trusted brands including HyFlex, Ringers, MICROFLEX, and AlphaTec.  Ansell Textile Lanka is widely recognised for its sustainability leadership, having received multiple national accolades including the Gold Award at the 2024 Presidential Environmental Awards. Ansell’s Sri Lankan operations are central to the company’s growing PPE portfolio, producing 1 million body protection garments and 2.5 million pairs of gloves per month, securing an annual turnover of USD 24 million.

Before adopting GSDCost, Ansell relied on manual time study and team experience based SMV values to carry out costing and capacity across operations. The absence of reliable SMVs and real-time data visibility meant teams often worked with outdated or conflicting information, undermining confidence in costings and limiting the ability to make informed, data-driven decisions. As product complexity and demand scaled in body protection from 35 to 150 styles, it was important for ATL to have standardised methods, values, and training in order to manage inefficiencies across its manual practices.

Eroshan Nilanga, Manager, Industrial Engineering, Ansell Textile Lanka, said, “As our product portfolio expanded from 35 to 150 styles, we moved to more complex manufacturing processes. Issuing accurate SMV values and standardised methods is challenging day by day. Therefore, we needed a globally recognized, scientific solution that could standardize SMVs and bring greater transparency and control to our operation processes. GSDCost stood out for its data validation, proven methodology, and ability to support scalable, cost-effective manufacturing.”

Coats Digital’s SaaS-based method-time-cost optimisation solution, GSDCost, was implemented at the Ansell Textiles Lanka facility to support the company’s growing need for accurate SMV benchmarks and to improve cross-functional collaboration. The solution enables the establishment of international standard time benchmarks using digitized motion codes and predetermined times, so that Ansell can now ensure uniformity in costing, planning, and production.

Following its implementation of GSDCost, Ansell achieved a 7% reduction in SMVs across its plants, establishing a single version of truth for costing and productivity. As a result, its body protection garment line, for example, saw a productivity improvement of between 6–7%. The company has now transitioned from manually tracking 36 styles to having accurate SMVs available across 150 styles, enabling more precise and scalable production planning. In addition, operator training has been standardised through video-based motion analysis, effectively upskilling teams and aligning operational practices across the organisation.

Presantha Fernando, Associate Director, Manufacturing Operations, Ansell Textile Lanka, said: “Accurately benchmarking SMVs across styles and factories has given us high confidence in our costing data. This supports smarter decisions as we expand and diversify production, while significantly improving transparency and alignment between finance and operational teams.”

With GSDCost onboard, Ansell is now better equipped to manage scale-ups—such as the major increase in glove production—while avoiding capacity blind spots and unnecessary freight costs. Enhanced visibility has proved instrumental in enabling the company to actively diversify its manufacturing footprint beyond China in response to growing supply chain volatility.

“GSDCost has become an excellent tool for standardising our manufacturing process,” added Eroshan Nilanga. “It’s provided a standardised framework that not only ensures costing accuracy but also accuracy of the employee incentive payment process. The clarity and consistency GSDCost delivers enables us to scale with confidence and respond swiftly to new growth opportunities. That level of control is proving invaluable.”

GSDCost, Coats Digital’s method analysis and predetermined times solution, is widely acknowledged as the de facto international standard across the sewn products industry. It supports a more collaborative, transparent, and sustainable supply chain in which brands and manufacturers establish and optimize ‘International Standard Time Benchmarks’ using standard motion codes and predetermined times. This shared framework supports accurate cost prediction, fact-based negotiation, and a more efficient garment manufacturing process, while concurrently delivering on CSR commitments.

Karthik Duraisamy,  Sales Director, Coats Digital, commented “In an industry facing growing complexity and unpredictability, Ansell’s impressive productivity gains and standardisation across multiple production lines highlight just how vital scientifically calculated SMVs are for ensuring operational consistency and scalability.

We’re proud to support Ansell in building a transparent, future-ready manufacturing framework that not only strengthens resilience but also supports its ambitious environmental and performance objectives.”

Key Benefits and ROI for Ansell Textiles Lanka:

• Up to 7% reduction in SMV.
• 6–7% productivity increase in body protection garments.
• Standardised operator training via video-based motion analysis
• Guide for future costings
• Supports scale-up in near future from 1 million to 2 million garments/month
• Enhanced transparency across manufacturing and finance teams

Note: The headline, insights, and image of this press release may have been refined by the Fibre2Fashion staff; the rest of the content remains unchanged.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (HU)

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At first, the winners of the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize for 2026 enjoyed the envy of their peers. But since their works of fiction earned this distinction, these authors have found themselves facing harsh scrutiny from the literary community, with several accused of enlisting generative artificial intelligence to write for them.

The allegations have come from numerous readers, many of them writers themselves, expressing bafflement and dismay that the prize jury could have overlooked potential signs of inauthentic authorship.

Each year, the Commonwealth Foundation, a nongovernmental organization in London, awards its short story prize to one writer in each of five regions: Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. One overall winner is then selected from that short list. Regional winners take home £2,500 (about $3,350), while the top winner, to be announced next month, claims £5,000 (about $6,700).

On May 12, the respected UK literary magazine Granta published the top five 2026 entries—all previously unpublished, per the rules of the contest—on its website. (It has hosted the winning submissions for the prize since 2012.)

Within days, however, one entry aroused suspicion. “The Serpent in the Grove,” a story by Jamir Nazir of Trinidad and Tobago, which had taken honors for the Caribbean region, struck a few people as bearing the stylistic tells of AI-generated text.

“Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize,” wrote researcher and entrepreneur Nabeel S. Qureshi, a former visiting scholar of AI at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, in a post on X on Monday. “‘Not X, not Y, but Z’ sentences everywhere, the ‘hums’ trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing. A major milestone for AI, at any rate…”

“They say the grove still hums at noon,” Nazir’s mysterious and atmospheric tale begins. In his screenshot of the opening paragraphs, Quereshi highlighted the second line as what he considered to be a signature example of AI syntax: “Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound—as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there.”

As the literary community undertook a closer read of Nazir’s story, many criticized its language and metaphors as nonsensical, wondering how the Commonwealth judges could have seen any merit to them. Others shared screenshots showing that the AI-detection tool Pangram flagged “The Serpent in the Grove” as 100 percent AI-generated, a result that WIRED independently confirmed. (While no AI-detection software is perfect, third-party analysis has consistently determined Pangram to be the most accurate, with a near-zero rate of false positives.)

Nazir did not return a request for comment relayed through an email address listed on his Facebook page. The posts on that account and the LinkedIn profile of a Jamir Nazir in Trinidad and Tobago also scan as AI-generated on Pangram. Although some speculation had it that Nazir himself could have been an entirely AI-created persona, a 2018 article in the Trinidad and Tobago edition of the The Guardian about his self-published poetry collection Night Moon Love—which includes a photograph of Nazir holding the book—suggests that he is a real person.

WIRED contacted both Granta and the Commonwealth Foundation about Nazir’s story; neither commented directly, but both issued public statements.

‘We are aware of allegations and discussion regarding generative AI and our Short Story Prize,” wrote Razmi Farook, director-general of the Commonwealth Foundation, in a statement on the organization’s website. “We take these claims seriously and are committed to responding to them with care and transparency.” Farook defended the judging process for the prize as “robust,” with multiple rounds of readers and the top-level judges selected for their “expertise.”