15 jobs one auto one day

[alan802]

We did 13 setups today.  My printer is on vacation so it was me being the printer.  I have a screen tech, the catcher who also de-tapes screens and lays out the shirts on the carts, and the printer.  The screen tech will help break down jobs on press but other than that he's back reclaiming, coating, or developing screens.  Our catcher obviously catches the garments at the end of the dryer, lays jobs out, tapes up screens that have dried and get's them ready to print with and he will prep the screens for reclamation.  Whoever is printing has a pretty big workload but the screens are brought to him taped and ready to put in the press so he doesn't have to venture too far from the press for anything.  When we are fully staffed and really busy, I will spend 6-8 hours of the day out in production doing whatever needs to be done at that time.  I may help tear down the press, stack shirts, unload the press, make ink, virtually anything that needs done that someone else isn't doing.  When we have a normal load, I will only spend 1-3 hours in production and will be busy doing whatever needs done in the other building or helping the sales staff with their customers.  So with all that blabbering I'd say we have about 3.4 employees dedicated to production and it can be as low as 3 and as high as 4 depending on how busy we are.  Busy means we have 9-12 jobs on the schedule per day with 15-24 setups needing to be done per day.  Normal is 6-8 jobs with regular (small quantities, 24-144).  If we're doing a big job I usually go back to the press and tend the ink and dial in the settings to get things dialed in perfectly while the press is running.

We did a few more one colors today but 90% of our "one color" jobs are technically 2 because they are white ink on dark garments. 

[GraphicDisorder]

In a shop like yours Alan who sorts incoming garments?   What about ordering of blanks and such?   Sales?   Are each of those there own deal or do your productions guys get tied up in that too?   Curious how others do it in bigger shops. 

[Doug S]

Our normal day is 4 to 6 different jobs with mostly quantities of 24 to 150.  We just have me, my wife and a part timer that reclaims, unloads and has no desire to expand his knowledge of the process.  I do the coating, seps, developing, setting up the press and loading and my wife does the stacking, boxing and occasionally puts on the latex gloves and walks around the press to check/add ink as well as keeps up with the walk ins.  The other day we had 1668 shirts with 6 colors back and 1 color front.  I think I like the smaller quantity jobs.  That was 2 days for us due to the lack of man power.  Although I do have a kid that just quit at another printing shop that only did simple printing and never printed halftones of any sort he seems eager to learn so I hope that works out. 

[ZooCity]

This is really enlightening to see the different staffing setups, appreciate the responses!

Ours is or I should say with a hire we're about to make and one internal hire will be:

• A "front of house" person to do the basic office mgmt stuff and distill various client requests down to something coherent that we can estimate and mockup
• Me doing all art, seps (unless outsourced) populating work order tech sheets, and everything else imaginable
• A gatekeeper checking in all shirts, readying for press and checking out all shirts, delivery, shipping and receiving basically.
• Various part timers working at the back of the dryer under the gatekeeper's direction, as needed.
• Lead printer setting up and doing main operation of the auto.
• Skipper printer (there should be a term for this, like private first class or something...) assisting the lead with operation and doing teardown.
• Ink and Screen tech doing what you might think and assisting on press when ahead on their work, i.e., almost never.

This is the plan we've been executing this month and it seems solid compared to what I'm seeing here.  Our goal is to stay smaller in staff and run faster with better processes and, where appropriate, equipment.   We also have a bookkeeper in house but notable roles that are missing and therefore dumped onto me as the owner are equipment and building maintenance guy, HR, R&D, marketing, etc. 

Equip maintenance may be one of the more overlooked roles for a shop as it grows.  When things are going smoothly we do it every Friday late in the shift with some beers but at some point it's necessary to have someone, part time or full, depending on the amount of gear in a shop, just doing it exclusively.  The hours it takes to do it properly can be significant, I spent at least three hours on yearly PM on our compressor last Sat., and it's very important to boot.

[tonypep]

3 person crews on all autos.

As in loader/puller....third op is watching ink/doing teardowns and setups?

Loader/unloader/dryer op.....prepress departments

[Underbase37]

3 person crews on all autos.

As in loader/puller....third op is watching ink/doing teardowns and setups?

Loader/unloader/dryer op.....prepress departments

Yep, this here too.

Murphy37

[tonypep]

In larger shops you will often find team captains (or whatever) in charge of three or more autos. They are animals when it comes to changeover and in between keep ink/screens/garments etc flowing. At Harlequin when we were in three separate buildings we had a Production Stager who kept in touch with me via walkie talkie (no cell phones then!) Or over intercom "Teardown on press eight stat!"

[Sbrem]

I'm up front, all office stuff, sales, and my partner helps there too, plus his wife does light bookkeeping. One full time artist (with close to 40 years experience) who handles 95% of art (I do the high end seps) a production manager who schedules, prints, and handles all shipping and receiving, a full time screen guy who I first hired as my assistant when he was 18 at my old shop, he's 48 now, knows his stuff, 3 folks on either auto; loader, unloader, catcher, who boxes, writes packing slips, moves them to shipping, and helps get the next order ready. He also cleans screens. If our screen guy isn't in, my partner covers for him, and very rarely, I help out there, as I was a screen maker for 18 years until we started this business, now it's not wise for me to be doing production work, I have more important things to do, so that they all have something to do. We've had as many as 15 employees, but that was before the economy went south 5 or 6 years ago. A slow recovery, less people, but still here...

Steve

[alan802]

In a shop like yours Alan who sorts incoming garments?   What about ordering of blanks and such?   Sales?   Are each of those there own deal or do your productions guys get tied up in that too?   Curious how others do it in bigger shops. 

The crew I mentioned earlier was strictly screen printing production but we have others that do the receiving of goods, purchasing, etc.  The sales person takes an order then usually purchases it themselves online but if they're busy we have someone that does admin stuff that can handle that while they answer phones and help walk-ins.  Then the garments come in and we have enough coming in every day that a full time employee is needed just to handle that.  She checks all the quantities and styles and goods come in already sorted by PO and each job has it's own PO so we don't spend much time sorting through thousands of garments trying to figure out where they go.  Then once the job is checked in, it goes to the department that will decorate it.  Then it's up to production to take the job from there.  When the job is finished the sales person is notified and they contact the customer and they come pick it up or we ship it out.  If the job is shipped out, the receiving person then gets the job back and ships it out.  We have an artist on staff that handles mostly screen printing art but he also handles engraving when it's something difficult that our laser engraver can't do.  Our laser engraver also does deliveries and accounts receivables since our engraving department only does a dozen jobs a week on average.

We used to do things a little differently.  The sales person would take an order then turn it in to a purchasing agent who would then do the "data entry" into shopworks and then purchase the goods.  We lost a good purchasing agent years ago and couldn't find anyone that could do the job without making many mistakes so the sales staff sort of took over the purchasing because it's difficult to have to handle mistakes made by others and it works out great the way we do it now.  The sales person has more to do with the job and therefor more accountability/responsibility and only two sales people are actually busy enough at times to not handle their own purchasing.  If a sales person is too busy we have an inside sales person (handles customer provided accounts) who can do the data entry and purchasing for the job sort of like the old system we had.

When customers come in a sales person will usually take care of them but we have a person up front answering phones and helping walk-ins if a sales person isn't available (early mornings, sales staff drags into work about 9-9:30 most days).

I think our system has room for improvement, it's far from perfect.  We could trim some fat here and there and we're trying to maximize everyone's abilities and put people where they do the best job and that's not easy.  My wife has someone that is helping her now since she sells the majority of what we produce and that's not working out too well.  You have to be very detail oriented to do most of this.  One misplaced letter or number and you get a completely wrong shirt and we have things in place to catch those mistakes but they get missed on occasion.   

[GraphicDisorder]

In a shop like yours Alan who sorts incoming garments?   What about ordering of blanks and such?   Sales?   Are each of those there own deal or do your productions guys get tied up in that too?   Curious how others do it in bigger shops. 

The crew I mentioned earlier was strictly screen printing production but we have others that do the receiving of goods, purchasing, etc.  The sales person takes an order then usually purchases it themselves online but if they're busy we have someone that does admin stuff that can handle that while they answer phones and help walk-ins.  Then the garments come in and we have enough coming in every day that a full time employee is needed just to handle that.  She checks all the quantities and styles and goods come in already sorted by PO and each job has it's own PO so we don't spend much time sorting through thousands of garments trying to figure out where they go.  Then once the job is checked in, it goes to the department that will decorate it.  Then it's up to production to take the job from there.  When the job is finished the sales person is notified and they contact the customer and they come pick it up or we ship it out.  If the job is shipped out, the receiving person then gets the job back and ships it out.  We have an artist on staff that handles mostly screen printing art but he also handles engraving when it's something difficult that our laser engraver can't do.  Our laser engraver also does deliveries and accounts receivables since our engraving department only does a dozen jobs a week on average.

We used to do things a little differently.  The sales person would take an order then turn it in to a purchasing agent who would then do the "data entry" into shopworks and then purchase the goods.  We lost a good purchasing agent years ago and couldn't find anyone that could do the job without making many mistakes so the sales staff sort of took over the purchasing because it's difficult to have to handle mistakes made by others and it works out great the way we do it now.  The sales person has more to do with the job and therefor more accountability/responsibility and only two sales people are actually busy enough at times to not handle their own purchasing.  If a sales person is too busy we have an inside sales person (handles customer provided accounts) who can do the data entry and purchasing for the job sort of like the old system we had.

When customers come in a sales person will usually take care of them but we have a person up front answering phones and helping walk-ins if a sales person isn't available (early mornings, sales staff drags into work about 9-9:30 most days).

I think our system has room for improvement, it's far from perfect.  We could trim some fat here and there and we're trying to maximize everyone's abilities and put people where they do the best job and that's not easy.  My wife has someone that is helping her now since she sells the majority of what we produce and that's not working out too well.  You have to be very detail oriented to do most of this.  One misplaced letter or number and you get a completely wrong shirt and we have things in place to catch those mistakes but they get missed on occasion.   

Certainly sounds like it works.

Our shop is pretty different, but we are just small timers. 

I handle about 99% of the sales and communication, well over 100 emails a day.  Our artist at times handling one here and there as he communicates with all art jobs sometimes they will be ready to buy and he will just quote it and sell it.  I input all orders into our system.
Erik does artwork, 5 days a week, day in and day out often on the high side of 2-5 days turnaround on artwork
Shelly handles all ordering, seps, screen selection, and alignment before burning.  Shelly does all loading and unloading during most jobs.  Erik or I will help unload on large jobs or when we need to move faster to fit our work into our time frame.
James sorts all incoming and counts all outgoing, as well as does all shipping.  He also does all the burning and washing out of screens.  James also pulls garments at the back of the dryer when Shelly prints.
Stephanie does embroidery only, nothing else.  Shelly does her digitizing as well.  Even names.  Stephanie will at some point move in to doing her own digitizing but she's so caught up in doing the actual embroidery that doesn't work yet.  We will have her a helper at some point then that will shift. 
We have screens cleaned on the weekends by my parents who are retired but like a little extra spending money to help when they travel and such.

Our shop has tons of room for improvement.  But with our current staff this is how it's best worked so far, but I see it all changing soon again.  The faster burning will really help us.

[Inkworks]

We're small-timers too.

1 full time embroiderer
1 embroiderer helper
1 full time front desk Girl (keeps me on-task too!) Jill-of-all-trades
1 padprinter, general clean-up, screen tear-down, set-up, puller/catcher
1 screenroom, screenprinter, setter-upper, tear-downer, handyman,
Me: Art, Quotes, correspondence, emails, padprinter, screenprinter, jack of all trades.

I need 1 more full timer, someone with computer art abilities and ideally someone who can become a good screenprinter.

I don't have much ambition to grow beyond that.

[Printficient]

Tony,
What are your parameters for a complete job?  Reason I ask is that with a full crew I calculated 4.5 - 6 hours to do the 15 1 color 48 piece runs.

[alan802]

Tony,
What are your parameters for a complete job?  Reason I ask is that with a full crew I calculated 4.5 - 6 hours to do the 15 1 color 48 piece runs.

That's cause you're doing it on paper.  The paper version and actual production version very rarely match up.  I've spent years comparing the two and trying to have a baseline of paper numbers that will actually translate into real production output.

[Inkworks]

I'm with Alan, paper planning (x) correction-for-real-world factor (1.3 - 1.8 is what I use) = actual time

[alan802]

I'm with Alan, paper planning (x) correction-for-real-world factor (1.3 - 1.8 is what I use) = actual time

I thought I was the only insane person who would actually have a number for it and mine is very close to that 1.5.