ImagesMagUK_Digital_Edition_Feb18

www.images-magazine.com FEBRUARY 2018 images 31 BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Turbocharge your press workflow Get more out of your screen print presses with some money-making advice from Marshall Atkinson T his month we are going to talk about the concept of ‘more’ when it comes to automatic screen print production. Let’s face it, we all want more production daily out of these units. That’s why they were purchased in the first place. Sadly though, when I visit shops I often see the same mistakes on the production floor that restrict performance. Sales and the front office want the jobs out the door, and production is sweating bullets trying to keep up. Finding minutes But to turbocharge the production floor a few things have to be set in place first. These aren’t hard to do, but they do require you to think about things a little differently. The first concept that I want you to consider is that you are only making money when your press is operating. Every moment that your press is idle is a lost opportunity to add to your bank account. That being said, anything and everything you can do to minimise the amount of non-value added time to your production floor should be scrutinised. Let’s say your shop operates with an eight-hour production shift. Of those eight hours or 480 minutes, for how many minutes do you think each press is actually printing? Are you measuring this? If you remove breaks and lunch, that’s going to leave you with about seven hours for printing. Depending on the size of print runs your shop produces you may only be actually printing for half of that. So, in an eight-hour period, you are only printing for three and a half hours. Want more printed shirts at the end of the dryer daily? Increase the amount of time that you are actually printing by examining all the reasons that you aren’t. Information One reason why presses aren’t churning out shirts is because print crews are stopping to try to understand something on the work order or art instructions. If anyone has to come up to the front office and meekly ask, “Hey, what does this mean?”, there is a flaw in your system. Want more shirts printed in a day? Make it easier for your production crews to understand what to do. Your work order should be similar to a construction blueprint. Everything is there. Not only should there be the obvious garment information on the order – SKU, quantity, sizes, etc – but a mock-