ImagesMagUK_February_2022

70 images FEBRUARY 2022 www.images-magazine.com BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Hit it! Keep missing deadlines? Marshall Atkinson shares his advice on how to consistently hit critical production dates, with a focus on inventory issues this month, and art challenges and shop efficiencies in the next issue I n the last few weeks, I have had at least a dozen or so conversations with shop owners on how to hit critical production dates. Their production teams are behind and they can’t figure out how to catch up. If this was a restaurant kitchen, the term would be ‘in the weeds’. It takes a lot of effort and thought to solve this challenge, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all panacea, as I’ll discuss over the course of this two- part series. The right kind of work One critical production date challenge that repeatedly crops up is the type of work that the shop is bringing in. Good work is profitable. Bad work is not. It’s that easy. Some shops are convinced that they need to do a mixture of retail (or full price) orders and contract (or wholesale) orders to keep their equipment spinning. Everyone prices things differently so for the sake of argument let’s say that for a retail order the profit is £5 a shirt. For the contract job, it is 50p a shirt. (Your figures may vary from these – don’t shoot the messenger!) Overloaded The challenge for many shops is that they are overloaded with 50p a shirt work, which squeezes out the £5 short orders – there are only so many hours in the day. Right now, there could be so much work coming in that you are actually working overtime to get the 50p a shirt jobs out the door. I’ve spoken to a shop owners recently who are working nights and weekends to keep up with these orders. They can’t hit critical production dates as they are already more than a week late on their 50p a shirt orders. When I ask why they don’t have more retail £5 a shirt work on the schedule, their standard refrain is: “I wish. We’re just so busy I don’t have time to work on those types of sales!” Take a look at what is causing the critical production date challenges in your shop. Maybe it isn’t a retail vs contract type of work issue. It could be that you are filled with a lot of low quantity work when ideally you want to be handling bigger orders. Do you have a lot of orders that are under 36 or 48 pieces? What is the percentage of your work that’s accounted for by these low quantity jobs? Recently, a six-auto shop that was struggling with hitting scheduled production dates had 47% of its workload under 48 pieces, and these jobs were going on the automatic presses. The teams were spending the majority of their day setting up these jobs rather than actually printing shirts. The downtime involved was literally choking them. Inventory – not in the system This is a common challenge with contract shops. The client takes a job and purchases the inventory. It gets sent to the shop either before the purchase order arrives or it has been put in the system. Depending on how much contract work you do, this could be about 10%-30% of your daily deliveries of inventory that hits your receiving department. This creates an enormous pile of uncounted, unreceived and unprocessed potential problems. It’s no wonder you are having major trouble hitting those critical production dates. Some shops call these NIS (not in the system) orders. I prefer to label them UFO (unidentified flying objects) orders. Why? Just because it’s funnier! UFO seems