THE HARVARD CENTER FOR TEXTILE AND APPAREL RESEARCH HARVARD UNIVERSITY EST. 1990 PROFESSOR FREDERICK H. ABERNATHY, DIRECTOR http://www.hctar.org    The competitive dynamics in the apparel-textile industries are being transformed by significant changes in retailing, especially technological innovations that allow retailers to offer consumers a growing variety of products while reducing their exposure to inventory risk. The Harvard Center for Textile and Apparel Research  (HCTAR) documents responses of apparel and textile suppliers to these changes and provides recommendations on how all of the players in these channels can compete in the future.    These themes are developed in a prize-winning book, A Stitch in Time: Lean Retailing and the Transformation of Manufacturing, by Frederick H. Abernathy, John T. Dunlop, Janice H. Hammond, and David Weil, available from Oxford University Press. Among other findings, the book shows how firms that change the way they think about risk and use information technology effectively can substantially reduce inventories and increase performance.        Ongoing work at the Center is extending these insights into three important areas. First, the Center is studying the effects of the system of global trade under the World Trade Organization that will emerge in 2005 with the end of apparel and textile quotas. Center researchers are investigating what sourcing patterns will look like and what manufacturers must do to compete after 2005.     Second, the Center is applying models developed in its apparel / textile study to the residential building supply channel to gain insights that can be applied to that industry and beyond.    Finally, the Center is developing models to improve companies’ ability to integrate risk into decision-making and improve inventory policies, product sourcing decisions, production scheduling, and product mix decisions.     Other research areas include human resource and labor market regulation, examining the impact of innovative human resource practices on firm performance as well as improving labor standards in the United States and internationally. The Center has developed products of direct benefit to the apparel and other industries, including Accumark Optimizer, which allows for automatic marker making and compaction of pattern lay-outs before cutting. In all of these efforts, the Center explores the implications of industry changes for trade, labor, and economic policies, and provides results to decision makers in industry and government.