Having outlined the most relevant technologies available today to support the design process, we now focus our attention on the manufacturing of the shoes. If giving a complete description of what are the possibilities and detailed functionalities of the design tools, was a complex task, summarizing in a few pages the whole range of diverse technologies that enter into the manufacturing phase is virtually impossible.

One technical topic that does not follow strictly into any one of the phases we mentioned above, is the one about the internal logistic systems; we mean by that a combination of physical (conveyors, elevators, actuators of various kinds) and software components that are used to transport and dispatch the components of the shoes, at various stages of the manufacturing process, from one station to the other of a given line (within the department) and from one department to other. These systems tend to have, in shoe companies organized in a modern way, a great relevance and they largely contribute to a smooth and highly controlled flow of operations. Hence this topic deserve a specific treatment that we will try to include in the relevant part of the analysis that follows, aiming in particular to highlighting the impact of the presence of such systems to the good performance of the specific processing phase.

Information Technologies also play an ever increasing role in manufacturing operations, at all level from process control and monitoring, to production scheduling , handling of the physical and data flows (as mentioned above), integration with the company IT platform and so on; once more this issue would deserve a dedicated analysis that there is no possibility of including in these pages, As for the logistics systems, we will try to highlight the role that these technologies might play in the individual phases of the manufacturing process.

If we start with cutting state of the art means dieless (or continuous) cutting systems; this generation of machines, which first appeared in their prototype stage in the late eighties, are now mature products and they have been accepted all over the world not only as the key technology for producing prototypes and small test runs of shoes, but, more and more, as valid alternatives to the more traditional machines and equipment also for production. Stitching operations are still regarded as the most delicate and complex operations in shoe making; this aspect together with their highly labour intensive nature induced shoe companies, in particular in high labour cost countries, to look for low cost alternatives to this complex phase by outsourcing this part of the process to external companies. Technology did not really bring in, until now, relevant innovations such that to change this situation.

Summarizing in a few lines all the different forms and applications of modern technologies that are available to support making operations, is virtually impossible; we will then rather concentrate, in this section too,  on giving some comments on the leading edge technologies that are available to shoe companies to improve the efficiency of the making process. We will hence refer to  two families of technologies: dedicated NC controlled machines and robots. By dedicated NC controlled machines we refer to the current generation of fully electronic machinery that are available to perform the most important phases of the making process: toe lasting machines, heel and side lasting machines, bottom pounding ones, roughing and cementing machines, both for the bottom part of the lasted upper and for the sides. Many models from many suppliers are available nowadays; as for lasting machines (toe, heel and side), the most modern ones all feature programmable clamps and nozzles for the application of the thermoplastic cement, automatic adaptation to changes in size and models, high flexibility and programmability, together with top performance in terms of throughput (many hundreds of pairs a day) and quality.