Some ways to minimize garment handling:
1. Have a good receiving/shipping manager. Know the day the shipment arrives what you are short, he should be able to send manifest updates from shipping to get the missing items. Nothing worse than being set up on a difficult job and find out the goods are short and the job will be set up again.
2. Have dedicated order pullers who handle shirts all day long. Ours counted in each dozen and then arranged to print by color way and size, larges first. then XL then M/S.
The reason? on a 1:3:5:3 scale we could afford a few rejects on large and rejects tend to happen in the beginning until the job is balanced and can run as near non stop as posslble. One other area that cost money is your customer sending in over dyed goods in large plastic bags that you get to turn inside out and lay flat and figure out how to get the wrinkles out of!! Only way is send them through the oven and stack for a few days, but nothing we got paid for!. I tried to get .10 to .25 every time a shirt got handled and counted in the print run, not always a given, but some customers, did understand.
3. Large orders: You can get 1440 shirts on a pallet in dozens and shrink wrap it but does that help printing or slow down printing? IMO it slows it down. Laying out dozens to print by the loader is a huge waste of time and is often a slack period that the workers take advantage of. I like laying out shirts perfectly flat with an emphasis on lining up the hems. 300 pcs one way, 300 pcs the other. On ring spuns it flattens the fibers a little, on open end it presses the slubs into the fabric enough the ink covers them and doesn't pick them up. I trained all employees to flip load. Why? The loader sees both sides of the shirts for holes, threads or slubs and we found it centers the shirt better. Use a pallet lifter so the loader only has to hit a foot peddle to raise the shirts to his load level.
4. Floating workers - One of the most coveted jobs in our shop was the floater. This person steps in and loads on bathroom breaks, water breaks, or for a breather. They also push inks in, tell the ink dept before they run out of ink they need more and help get shirts to the loader or clear empty pallets, keep boxes and shirts moving to the print area. They can do this for 2-3 presses.
5. Catching is one thing boxing and manifesting is another. Catchers can be overwhelmed looking for rejects, ( unloaders placed them sideways on our belt to tell the catcher, but the catcher is the last QC you may have on a job. That should be the extent of their efforts. We had assigned personnel to count the dozens and neatly pack the boxes and manifest. One could do two lines off the back of the table accurately. We had and extension at the end of the oven that allowed for hang tags and price stickers.
6. Individual fold and bag. Buy an Amscomatic auto folder and bagger. Go for all the bells and whistles you can afford. Auto sticker and sizing strips, auto bag. We also had a scale under the box they fell into and when the weight for the size was correct it kicked the box off and the person running the press had ample pre made boxes to drop on the scale. Complete box went into a gravity feed ramp and auto taper. You can also get a robot to pick it up and make the pallet, but that beast costs the same as an auto.
7. Short runs went to a separate pack and ship area for hand fold, our own hang tag, and packing and shipping. The invoicing justified the extra care. Put in catalogs, stickers, promo stuff, it brings em back. If I had it still running today I would have a digital printer with auto cut and make them some promo stickers with a price list. Find a local guy to job this out to when it becomes an order. Easy money.
8. Pre-Packs. The easiest way i ever had was to make or purchase a conveyor belt. All sizes teed into this cover belt. 1 person for each size station. Box goes on belt, workers pack their scale quantity 1:3:5:3 - box gets autotaped and shipping docs adhered to box and manifested by another worker to keep up. In today's bar coded world it is even easier to do the manifest electronically. All address stickers add up to the order, no extras should be left. Quantiiy, PO, amount all on sticker, stickers have box 1 of 2 of and so on.
9. Garments on hangers. When you get your first order this is a lesson to buy rack and rail in your shop. There simply is no easier way to handle large volumes of shirts on hangers. Think of it as a rail road yard. Each print style gets 4-5 tracks, S,M,L,XL,XXl for example. Each track holds trolleys that hold 144 shirts on hangers. Somewhere itn the middle of this system are baggers who simply take the hung shirt, put it on a hook, and pull a bag over it. (these are pre made stations holding a thousand bag roll that is directly over the work station. Worker puts in on a trolley on the other side and with the push of the hand moves it down the line. Of all the things I purchased to handle shirts the rack and rail system is the best tool I have ever had. They get real complex, with bar codes for the trolleys, switches to move shirts onto their tracks. One worker can push a thousand shirts by himself. We colorcoded the sizes with plastic cards on the trolleys. Change switches, push them down the correct rails. AT the ends of the rails we did pre packs. We used gravity racks here to. XXls first, XL, L, M, SM into the box and down hill to the taper and manifester who had all labels for order, labeled and onto the pallets. You can have spurs going to the end of each press hung from the ceiling so fork lifts and traffic can go underneath. You can hang and bag at the end (which we found took too long), or just get on a hanger and onto a trolley. We would also rubber band by dozens, (also helps to prevent the shirts from disappearing). Once trolley was loaded it could be pushed and glide away to the main rack and rail area. We had 20 to 50 jobs at a time in the rack and rail area. Some were just dead ends holding an entire order. All could be pushed easily to the prepack rails. Then for real efficiency there are cool motorized trolley lifters that can put them on a second level to wait for shipping. Then a boom to go in the truck and just push the trolleys in and the driver hangs them on ropes. Sears shipped this way, many other higher paying, higher quality customers pay well for this, and to me it is the only way to handle prepacks on hangers.
Then last, I wish I had the bar coded systems I see in the shops today. Some monitor the entire PO from receiviing shirts, to pull, to stage, to ink/screens, to press ready, to pre-pack to shipping with it all tying into a master database for sales and owners to know where any order is exactly. (Great job to Jack Meola and his crew on this system I saw.) With Zebra printers at needed points tied to the system you know for sure where you are when you walk in every day.
Sorry for the long reply, but this handling is 75% of your labor sometimes with prepacks, staging, shipping, manifesting, documentation, pallets, and did I mention warehouse space needs? It takes 50% space (and its tight at 50%) to store enough shirts to keep presses busy and shipping space as well. We opted for 66-75% space for fulfillment and receiving and only 33 to 25% for the presses, but that all gets eaten with growth and becomes a costly bottleneck if the flow isn't instananeous to a pallet to be wrapped and scheduled for shipping asap. For some reason customers expect packinging with the print, one drawback of being the low bidder on the print is not catching all the required extras. Watch out for the hanger and size clips costs, as well as bags and boxes. We made more on fulflillment than printing, don't let them get it for free.
Tony we lived the same world, sales would take orders based on work, and not making a dime! The contract world is a penny dime business, when your shop is large enough it is a necessity to keep the bills paid along with what I call spec work, your own line, package printing, but in contract printing, fulfillment is either a headache or a money maker if down super effiecient.
Have a great Holiday eveyone
