ImagesMagUK_Digital_Edition_March_2018

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT www.images-magazine.com 32 images MARCH 2018 W hile increasing efficiency in your production department is critical to operations – from controlling the flow of goods to making your workstations more ergonomic and reducing unnecessary physical travel – some embroidery shops forget to optimise the most impactful part of any embroidery or custom decoration workflow: the flow of information. The value you provide as an embroidery business is directly derived from customisation and personalisation based on complicated, customer- provided specs, requiring considerable care just to decorate the right garments with the right designs and/or personalisation. Not only do you have to obtain the art, define thread colours and establish the size and placement of decorations, almost every item has specified colours, sizes and styles to contend with even before you add the embroidery. You are inundated with information that must be clearly and consistently communicated in Erich Campbell explains how best to manage the flow of information in your embroidery shop every step of your workflow. From the interview on the sales floor to info generated by art and digitising, to feedback such as customer approvals or the status of your received products and production, every department has critical information that has to be managed and accessed, leading to hundreds of interactions every day. This means that the way you handle information will have a significant effect on your success and efficiency. The symptoms of poor information flow – such as incorrectly decorated garments, delays caused by the need to track down or rediscover lost information, and failures to deliver on incompletely communicated customer interactions – can be mitigated with the proper tools and procedures. By creating operating standards and using systems that allow you to collect, store, access and communicate your information logically, you can deliver the best customer experience while making each employee’s work less frustrating. Workflow: killer tools and tactics [Above] An old school flow chart like this can seem silly to some, but if you are losing information, backtracking or generally just not getting the right assets to the right people, mapping out your order flow may help you identify the problem at hand [Below] Sometimes, particularly when you want to maintain a face-to-face meeting in your brick- and-mortar store, there’s nothing wrong with using analogue tools in your digital flow. A form like this can help you take all the pertinent notes in the initial interview process. After all, if there’s a field on the form, there should be an answer in it; that makes the process of complete info capture much easier