Images_Digital_Edition_April_2020

www.images-magazine.com APRIL 2020 images 35 KB BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT could be that your lack of processes means your employees make up the rules on how to do the work. Yikes! Today, I want you to take a step back and think about all of the processes that you deploy in your business. Are they working as they should? Let’s take the quoting process, for example. How many people are actively quoting customers in your shop? There probably is a system – maybe some software – that is being used to construct a quote when a customer requests some pricing. Is everyone quoting it the same way? How do you know? Take this test Without any warning or hint of what you are doing, ask each person on your quoting team to price out the following potential order and email you the quote. They are not allowed to compare notes or talk to each other. For the test to work, each person needs to do the work independently of everyone else. ■ Quantity: 25 S / 25 M / 25 L / 25 XL / 25 2XL / 10 3XL / 10 4XL ■ Youth quantity: 25 XS / 25 M / 25 XL ■ Gildan Softstyle 64000, 64000L & 64000B T-shirts in daisy ■ Customer provided art ■ Front left chest – PMS 2995 & PMS 186 ■ Full back – PMS 2995, PMS 186 & black ■ In-hands is five business days from today ■ Shipping to some city in the UK. Pick one Get everyone in your team to quote it. Include the owners of the company if they quote. Why? Because typically they don’t follow the processes well when quoting. (Sorry if this is you.) What are we doing here? This is testing to see if the process is working as it should. By now, you’ve mapped out how to quote an order for a customer. You’ve trained your staff. Here are some things that might have been missed: ■ Did they notice that the PMS 2995 light blue needs an underbase to work on the daisy shirt? ■ Adult and youth shirts. Did you quote two sets of screens? ■ Youth and up to an 4XL shirt: that’s a big size spread. Did everyone price that correctly? ■ In-hands five business days from today in another city: when should this order ship? Should it be a rush? Is there a fee? ■ What’s the availability of the garments with the distributor you use? Did they check? ■ When should the garments be in your shop, and do you need to overnight them to hit the event date? If you get a pile of different answers, this may mean that your customers are getting different answers too. What do you think this might mean to your bottom line every year? Observation In any department, you can learn a lot simply by observing the work being performed. Watch how your staff work. What stresses the process? Another point that you should consider is that your crew may be working hard implementing and diligently performing a process that simply doesn’t work the way it should. For example, once I was in a shop doing some coaching work and the management team spent a good deal of time organising the jobs for production. That’s great. Except for them, their process was to line the boxed inventory in lanes on the floor of the shop by the day of the week that the orders are going to be run. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Here was their problem: they spent a considerable amount of time moving boxes from one day to another because the art wasn’t approved in time. Or, they were missing a few pieces for the order and the goods weren’t coming in until a day or two from now. Not to mention that it was hard to conceive how to stage larger, palletised orders. Plus, they had to sort and find the inventory from another location for jobs that had inventory come in but weren’t scheduled to be worked on for a week or two. They had a process. But it didn’t work well. One of their staff members spent virtually the entire day moving boxes around on the floor to keep up with matching them up to what day the jobs were going to be produced. It was the equivalent of a T-shirt box whack-a-mole. That was a lot of wasted effort and labour. To them, they were working very hard at the organisation. They wanted to feed their production machines work, and this was the system they devised for staging. During my on-site visit, I suggested an alternative idea. What if all of the inventory was staged in one area after it was received? Each box was already labelled with the order number and other information. Simply segregate the boxes by the last digit of the This simple ‘one wish’ question can become a great tool to examine your processes