The overall aim of both projects, which attracted co-funding from the European Union, was the improvement of the shoe-making process, by improving quality thereby reducing early failures, customer dissatisfaction, wastage of materials and cost.

The SABOT project was concerned with the shoe bottoming process, in which the lasted upper is adhesively-bonded to the sole unit. The failure of this bond is the single biggest problem in modern shoemaking and accounts for the vast majority of customer returns. The performance of this bond is dependent on a large number of factors, including surface preparation, cement application, cement temperature at the moment of bonding and the pressure applied to the surfaces during bond formation.

During the SABOT project, quantitative information on the sole bonding process and the interrelation of these important factors was obtained for the first time. As a result, several improvements to factory processes were made and enhancements to existing shoe-making machinery were demonstrated. AOS's role in the project was to develop instrumentation for monitoring the shoe-bottoming process and to acquire the base dataset and, working with the other research organisations, to develop and demonstrate process improvements.