Receiving blank garments

[TL]

How do all the small/medium shops out there handle the receiving of blank garments to their shop?  In an ideal world we would receive the boxes and wouldn't have to check them because the suppliers ship with 100% accuracy the correct quantities/colours for every order.  However, as I'm sure many of you have experienced, the wholesale suppliers seem to have been getting worse with sending correct stock(incorrect sizes, 1/3 the order the wrong colour, etc.).  During a slow period, sure it's not a problem to put a lot of time into this but during your busiest season when  couriers show up with 35-40 boxes for 10-15 different orders how do you give the same amount of time to sorting and checking every single garment(especially on larger quantity orders)?  For a smaller shop like ours, we don't have a large shipping/receiving department(1 person and  1 floater that is busy doing other things most of the time) so it can be difficult to keep on top of this.  I'd like to hear as many different ways as possible that you guys think is the best way to handle this.

[T Shirt Farmer]

we piece count every order every time under 1000 units the time spent saves a lot of confusion in the long run.

[Homer]

we break it down with PO's from the supplier. When I order, I don't gang 20 orders together. I put maybe 4 or 5 orders under one PO. Items that are easy to separate, like a job that calls for Cardinal red G2000, another that calls for black hoodies and so on. When the boxes come in, they look at the work order and find the PO# and pull from those boxes. Then they only have to dig through a small number of boxes instead of all 20 that arrived in the shipment. From there we can break it down even faster since I put a wide variety of garments on the PO...Pull, count, stage - print....you can NEVER. EVER. ever ever ever trust a supplier to do ANYTHING except screw up the count, that you can bank on....


I also schedule items to arrive 2-3 days in advance of production so we aren't waiting on UPS , we can pull / count in a timely manner over the next day or so and not rush it. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast...

[TL]

I forgot to mention that most of the time the orders are being drop shipped to us, we aren't actually ordering the garments. 
Also, the person that does the receiving has another role as well.

[Frog]

There was actually a recent thread on drop shipments from contract clients. Unfortunately for you, it's in the Contract Shop board in the Business section that is restricted to you until you get your post count up to 10.
http://www.theshirtboard.com/index.php/topic,21556.0.html

[merchmonster]

Homer and I basically have same process. We get about 10 boxes a day every other day.
1. Sort boxes by vendor and P.O. customer Supplied garments must carry their P.O. or our po which is searchable in our work order system. Print work orders for all associated jobs in each shipment.
2. Unpack one shipment at a time, sort garments by style and color first. Then sort by size in sequential order. Associate garments with work orders.
3. Under 100 pcs count individually against work order, over 100 by dozen
4. If no issues, stage on a cart, put a label with job # cust name and attach receiving counts
5. If issues or incomplete segregate into holding area and resolve before sending to prod. Notify customer vendor or procurement depending on source of issue.

I can check in about 12 boxes an hour, it’s maybe 3-4 hours of work to fully stage a 12-16 box shipment with 10-15 pos. Sometimes I just go up to step 2 and then hand off the counting task to the employees. You can batch out the tasks if you are busy or just need 1 job out of a shipment.

[CBCB]

Wow this thread makes me feel like our system is ass backwards, but it works.

Once an Order is 'ready for production' in Printavo, it gets a card created in Trello. We use Printavo for invoicing and customer approvals, and then once the order is paid/approved it gets put into Trello so it can move through the production loop in a non-linear way. Printavo is weak in this department.

Anyway once the card is created in Trello it starts in a list with other fresh orders. Every day we do Purchasing at 2:30PM to meet cutoffs, and we simply go down this list and order the garments we need. Some orders need to be brought in from several different suppliers or warehouses, and that's where it gets complicated for us.

So we pop each order open, and add the items to the carts across various suppliers. We have labels for each supplier/warehouse, so every order gets marked with what warehouse/vendor it's coming from.

When a box arrives, we can filter our Trello by these labels. So I can see all the orders that have something from Alphabroder on the way. We crack the box open and start splitting it up. Once all the stuff from Alphabroder on that card is checked in, the Alphabroder label is removed. From there the card/Order is either ready to print, or itll still have labels on it waiting for shipments.

We have some additional automations to keep tabs on things. Like if something is 'on the way' for 3+ days we get an alert to check on the shipment. It also keeps all our info in one place, so if there is a shortage or a wrong amount received we can bump it back, add new labels for the new shipments, and move on.

We have checklists on all the cards for when the garments are all in, art is ready, etc.

This keeps us knowing what is ready to print so we always know what is up next. Basically when a card is marked as having the garments ready, and the art ready, it's good to go into the screen room and into production! Production marks the order 'done' in Printavo which keeps our customer service guys in the loop. And anyone in the company can check on any order and see where it's at.

[merchmonster]

Yeah  printavo kind of sucks at production management workflow . I’ll post the custom status categories we use to track our orders thru all stages. I’m considering moving off printavo to deconetwork - not solely for this reason but it is one of them.

[CBCB]

Yeah  printavo kind of sucks at production management workflow . I’ll post the custom status categories we use to track our orders thru all stages. I’m considering moving off printavo to deconetwork - not solely for this reason but it is one of them.

Yeah sometimes I feel like we’ve hit the ceiling on it and I don’t even have an auto yet.

The ‘tags’ are interesting but most features seem half-baked. Really wishing they’d improve the product instead of adding features, starting a convention & podcast amongst other things.

Going to take a look at deconetwork. Second time seeing it mentioned here recently.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[merchmonster]

heres screen shots of the statuses we use. my staff updates at each step, and i can filter in invoices view to see who we need to work on proofs for, order garments for, etc.

[merchmonster]

Yeah  printavo kind of sucks at production management workflow . I’ll post the custom status categories we use to track our orders thru all stages. I’m considering moving off printavo to deconetwork - not solely for this reason but it is one of them.

Yeah sometimes I feel like we’ve hit the ceiling on it and I don’t even have an auto yet.

The ‘tags’ are interesting but most features seem half-baked. Really wishing they’d improve the product instead of adding features, starting a convention & podcast amongst other things.

Going to take a look at deconetwork. Second time seeing it mentioned here recently.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

most big shops are on shopworks and they swear by it. i took the demo and i can't stand the user interface.

inksoft has a production management tool coming out that is being product managed by marshall atkinson so it should work well. time will tell though. i did like their new team store builder, it was pretty slick. imo deco networks product is nicer though.