Images_Digital_Edition_April_2020

36 images APRIL 2020 www.images-magazine.com BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT KB work order number. The boxes that end with a three are in row three. Boxes that end with a seven are in row seven. You get the picture. Palletised orders are staged the same way, but in a different area. Orders that had four boxes or fewer were in one area. The orders that had five boxes or more were on skids. Why? You can move four boxes in one trip with a handcart or dolly. When the staging team wants to bring the inventory to the production team, they simply look at the last digit of the work order and walk over and retrieve the goods. Inventory boxes are never moved from one row to another. After they were received and placed in the rows, the inventory sat until it was needed. They could redeploy the person that was moving the inventory boxes from Tuesday to Thursday each day to other, more important, tasks. Think downstream In another shop, I was brought in to look at their production efficiency. I was standing there talking to the owner when I noticed a woman absolutely slaying it on the neck printing machine. For this shop, they create custom printed apparel that goes direct to retail stores. Every shirt requires a custom neck label. The owner was explaining to me how proud he was of this particular staff member, as she was a magician on this neck label press. As I observed, I noticed that she printed and then pulled off each shirt and tossed it into a large box. When the box was full, it was brought down to a table, turned over, and then all of the shirts were segregated out by size and folded. She was printing so fast it took three other staff members to fold the shirts! They had a hard time keeping up, in fact. But with that, I saw an opportunity for improvement. Why not have someone else pull off the shirt and fold it on a cart? The owner said that the printer was so quick, nobody could keep up. “Hmm,” I thought. “Let’s test that notion.” We brought a staging cart over and placed it on the opposite side of the neck tag printer. One of the sorter crew came over too, and we had them pull a shirt off and fold it onto the cart. She could easily keep up. And in fact, they could actually run that machine faster as the printer didn’t have to slow down to remove the printed shirt. The owner was shocked. “I can’t believe we didn’t think of that,” he said. This meant that two other workers could be retasked to work on other priority jobs. The lesson here It’s great to have processes. I love them. It’s not so great to have processes that don’t adequately work or cause problems down the road. In your shop, are you working really hard on the wrong things? What could you improve or tweak? Have you ever asked your employees their opinion on the work they are doing every day? Do yourself a favour – ask this question to each team member individually, without other people listening: “If you had a magic wish to change one thing that could make your job easier to perform, what would you want to change?” Here’s a secret. If you ask 30 different people, you might get 30 different answers. But, you could also get many that express the same idea. This simple ‘one wish’ question can become a great tool to examine your processes and suggest a new direction for your company. The reason you need to keep the conversations private is to avoid group-think. You don’t want, “Yeah, what she said” as someone’s answer. Get to your one source of truth. But here’s my question for you. Are you willing to change when you get these new ideas? That’s the scarier part. Marshall Atkinson is a production and efficiency expert for the decorated apparel industry, and the owner of Atkinson Consulting and co-founder of Shirt Lab, a sales and marketing education company, with Tom Rauen. He focuses on operational efficiency, continuous improvement, workflow strategy, business planning, employee motivation, management and sustainability. www.atkinsontshirt.com It was the equivalent of a T-shirt box whack- a-mole