Unit production system (UPS).

The overhead rail and hanging carriers that move a single garment, or one bundle of cut parts, from sewing station to sewing station, so the operator never leaves the machine to fetch work. Eton Systems was founded in 1967 alongside the Eton shirt factory in Sweden and built the first one there, and it is still the reference vendor, with more than 5,000 installations claimed worldwide. The conveyor is not the product. Every carrier is tracked, so the software balances load across stations, holds a buffer in front of a slow operation, and can say where one made-to-measure jacket is; Joseph Abboud's New Bedford plant reports a 30% lead-time reduction on an Eton rail. Read the daily output on that page twice: the stat block says 1,000 tailored suits a day and the paragraph below it says more than 1,000 jackets and pants, which is not the same count. Two cautions. The acronym collides with United Parcel Service, so a line called UPS in a POD spreadsheet is either the sewing rail or the carrier bill and never both, and shops buy the rail as a transport upgrade when the payback is actually in operator idle time and work in progress.