Daily Production, per person.

[Maxie]

Does anyone have figures on how many prints per day one person should average.
Obviously this varies on the size of the run and number of colors etc.
We have two automatics and 4 people running them, they also prepare and wash screens.
I would like to compare figures with other shops.

[Colin]

You need to figure run speed per hour for jobs they actually do.

Then look at the different design/print elements that may make a job slower/faster to produce and figure their run speed for those jobs.

That will help you calculate how many prints your team should be able to get done per day - per design type.

It's not easy when your guys are not dedicated printers (cleaning/prep as well) to figure this stuff out.

I know the more veteran managers will have more nuanced ways to figure it out.

[Screen Dan]

Wowza.  That's a tough one.  Number one, so many variables.  Manual or automatic?  Film or CTS?  Fluorescent, MH, LED exposure?  Big boy pressure washers or Home Depot specials?  Dip tank? Average image size?  Average job size?  Average screen count?

Based on the fact that everybody is cross-trained in everything from screen prep to press operation and folding I would base that metric entirely on the profitability of their time as opposed to anything else.  How you would come up with the numbers to determine that would be far easier than a prints-per-day average.

Every shop is different.  We are hyper-specialized here.  I used to pump out 3000-5000 prints per day, average, when I ran a press.  That's a huge variance but a giant B/P is going to necessarily take longer than a left chest print, 1 huge run is going to have less setups than 8 jobs a day.  My screen guys need to process no less than 120 screens a day just to break even with the shop.  I can have no more than 10% of my screens broken without disrupting the logistics of my screen flow.  The ready-for-press rack has to account for a minimum of 30,000 prints per week to keep from working hand-to-mouth in the screen department and to keep lines from stopping to clean.  Some of this is logistical logic, some of it was figured out from years of data and average costing over that much time.  The easiest at-a-glance metric I have is my P:SR...Print to Screen ratio.  When we had 3 automatics I needed to maintain an average of 30 impressions per screen produced for the screen room to break even with the print shop.  With 4 automatics that has gone up to 50.  But that only tells me how screwed I might be at any given time, it tells me nothing of the efficiency of anything besides the guy making the separations...and that isn't even in my department.

I leave it to the business folks up front to determine whether this is profitable and sustainable.  So far so good.

I'd say identify the actual most important number and figuring out how to measure that will become far more obvious.

[Admiral]

Today:
40 setups
4058 prints
2.5 screen average per setup.

This is 2 print teams offset a bit to cover more hours on the Challenger (our other press being a Diamondback).  This is with 2 people operating together.

The person at the end of the dryer doesn't help on the press (but does help with cleanup and small random tasks).

[AAMike]

I like to figure the price per dozen of direct labor. By direct, I mean the money paid to the printer when they are printing.

[ZooCity]

Maxie, I agree with ScreenDan, you might want to use a different metric to figure this out, so many variables.   We use a gross profit to payroll ratio here to make sure we're in line. 

[Inkworks]

Me too, I figure "x" dollars gross profit per person per day, and as long as we average it we're good, some days are very low, like a big screen run, or lots of work prepping art/orders, some days we kill it. So far it works fine. If we were a big shop with dozens of employees I'd do something more formal, but this works for now at the size we're at.

[jsheridan]

Dry cycle your machine as fast as it can go and that is the maximum you can print in a day if that's all it did.

From there.. an operator should be able to load a consistent 750-850 per hour

A good day is around 500 pcs per hour

Reality is about 350 pcs per hour.

[jvanick]

we quote all jobs at 250pcs/hr... 

that seems to be a decent number to account for press stopages, etc.

the press is almost always spinning at 500+/hr...

from there you have to figure out your average setup / tear down time per screen...

-J

[jsheridan]

don't forget to account for those setup/down minutes as double cost..

if you can print 12 shirts a minutes.. and take 5 minutes to setup.. those 5 minutes of time equal the cost of 120 printed shirts.

You can't make back time, you can charge more for time lost

[ZooCity]

Maxie, something that may also help a lot is calculating an hourly shop rate.  We use this to keep tabs on the day to day.   It's more of an overall figure though and would include both your presses jobs. 

For reference, we are a 2 auto shop with 10-11 employees.  Our complete overhead/shop rate is about $245/hr, including desired net profit.  So we need to gross $1715 per 7 hour day at a minimum.  Like inkworks says, some days you might dip below that while working on projects that are necessary but not directly related to your gross pay, other days you're far above that figure.  If it all averages out each year, you're good to go.

[jvanick]

don't forget to account for those setup/down minutes as double cost..

if you can print 12 shirts a minutes.. and take 5 minutes to setup.. those 5 minutes of time equal the cost of 120 printed shirts.

You can't make back time, you can charge more for time lost

that's a REALLY good point.  never thought of it like that, but how true.

[DonR]

Admiral is killing it. If I am reading it correctly and he is talking about an 8 hour day, he is getting an average of 500 per hour with 40 setups. Setting up the 20 jobs with 2.5 screens in 15 minutes is 5 hours of work per press crew. Which would mean you are running at 6,666 per hour?

Are these numbers for 3 shifts? Even with 24 hours it's over 1,000 per hour.

[DonR]

Extra 0 in my numbers. It's 666 per hour for an 8 hours day and 105 per hour for a 24.  So I hope he is running at least 2 shifts or I am really doing something wrong.

[Doug S]

we quote all jobs at 250pcs/hr... 

that seems to be a decent number to account for press stopages, etc.

the press is almost always spinning at 500+/hr...

from there you have to figure out your average setup / tear down time per screen...

-J

We quote ours roughly the same at 275 an hour and it pretty much averages out.  Some jobs we can run at 500 an hour and then there is those that we are doing great to get 250 per hr.  I figure 3 minutes a screen for registration but often it doesn't take near that long.