ImagesMagUK_October_2021

www.images-magazine.com OCTOBER 2021 images 35 TIPS & TECHNIQUES could possibly need and keep an eye on it. Make sure you have vinyl, inks, papers, tools, and packing materials readily available. The moment you run out of any one of these, your production can come to a complete halt. I recommend you set up reorder levels so as to prevent this (ie identify a level of stock for each item that, when reached, staff will know that they need to reorder those materials). Even from a maintenance view, there’s always certain tools and products you should have to hand: a screwdriver set, allen key set, cleaning liquids, swabs, filters, and maintenance parts. These are all things that you should have on site and it’s best to have them all in one location. This makes it easier to check stock levels and locate tools the moment you need them. It doesn’t have to be hard to get a good workflow going, it just requires a little forward planning. Think of the ‘departments’ involved in your process and how you can link them together and minimise movement from one to the next, then apply that same thought process to the ‘department’ itself. www.mhmdirect.co.uk your racking, equipment and machinery are in place, it’s time to see if anything else can be done to make individual processes better. Plan ahead Do you have orders for similar items or similar prints? Can these be grouped together? Can T-shirts be pretreated and stored before they are printed? (Certain pretreatment brands allow a T-shirt to be printed up to two weeks after it was coated.) Should you do all your front prints first and then do all back prints after? Yes! It’s way more efficient that way, rather than printing a front, loading in the back print design to your printer, faffing with changing the platen if needed, printing the back, then repeating the process again for the front print. Print 100 fronts, flip them over, load the back print design to the printer once, change the platen once, then print all the backs. Quick, simple, and much more efficient. A saying I’ve learnt to live by with printing is ‘It’s better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it’. Be sure to have stock of everything you A circular workflow has the benefit of the stock and shipping departments being close to each other; less travelling results in quicker production The benefit of a circular workflow is that the stock and shipping departments are located close to each other. Raw materials enter the building, circulate your space until turned into a completed product, and are then packaged and shipped out through the same portal. Like in a good kitchen, less travelling results in quicker production, less handling of products and optimised efficiency. That’s why normally your sink, oven and fridge aren’t more than a single stride from each other; if you have to go from one end of the room to the other just to get to the next part of the process started, that’s valuable time that could be spent producing more products overall or completing another task. Your DTG printing equipment should be laid out in a similar fashion, with the printer, pretreater, heat press and dryer located near each other. If you have a conveyor dryer to cure the inks, it should be positioned such that wherever finished garments leave the dryer (either at the end or back at the start if a return belt is used), this should be close to the packing and despatch section to minimise time spent travelling between departments. Now that your workflow is arranged and LINEAR WORKFLOW CIRCULAR WORKFLOW STOCK STOCK PRINTING PRINTING SHIPPING SHIPPING