Images_May_2020_Digital_Edition

www.images-magazine.com 32 images MAY 2020 BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Will Pearson runs a small screen print shop and has been fanatical about the one-piece flow approach ever since he read two books 13 years ago: Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming; and The Machine that Changed the World by James Womack and Daniel Jones. Next issue, he’ll be taking a brief look at the history behind the one-piece flow system, and examining the mechanics that make this concept work. www.phantomscreenprint.co.uk Establishing a successful pull system is really hard to do Scheduling is also visually aided at the Goods In rack: jobs have colour-coded tags – blue for today, yellow for tomorrow AM. By the time the first job of tomorrow morning is finished, the before-noon delivery should have arrived containing the stock ■ Writing up the purchase order and job info, and ordering stock ■ Producing film ■ Shooting stencils, mixing ink and getting stencils taped out and press-ready ■ Production on press, and reclaim/packing. Once we had our own one-piece flow system up and running successfully, we were realising a 20% saving on time, for the same amount of resources – ie equipment and staff. This is huge! It means that the level of work that used to take all week, is now finished by the end of Thursday. We have 20% more capacity at no extra cost! The other big part of one-piece flow is that it reduces inventory of everything. It requires you to need less of everything on hand – screens, for example. In my shop, we run around seven jobs a day, averaging 22 stencils a day, but we have only 15 screens on hand. These are on constant rotation and on a full day most screens will have been shot for two separate jobs. We also need less space, because we also approach our ink, chemicals and sundries with the same philosophy: we have only enough of these consumables to get us through a very limited period of production. The bottom line The bottom line is that you will produce more work, more consistently and faster, without any need for extra labour or resources. You will be more profitable as your system becomes less wasteful, and you will have fewer unforeseen issues and a better strategy for dealing with problems. Once you move away from a batch and queue style operation, your production issues no longer have anywhere to hide and so you will be forced to confront and put right all those issues that constantly leave you with that familiar ‘firefighting’ feeling. So, why doesn’t everyone use one- piece flow? Because establishing a successful pull system that has one- piece flow and just in time as its guiding principles is really hard to do. It requires a redesign of your working practices from the ground up and, because it seeks to create a system where everything is very closely related to each other, signalling systems – otherwise known as Kanban systems – need to be introduced to ensure that everything happens in the right place at the right time. Plus, a one-piece flow system is very intolerant of mistakes, or machines and processes that are not completely dialled in. Think about the stencil- making aspect as an example – you coat only enough screens for the job – there’s no safety net of spare coated screens, so your system needs to be very tight at each stage: perfect screen- cleaning, perfect coating, perfect film and perfect exposures... Every time. Sadly, so many companies begin an initiative like this, but fail quickly, and revert to batch and queue methods because while there was waste in that system, at least it didn’t grind to a halt every time something wasn’t absolutely perfect. One-piece flow requires you to up your game; and if you do, it rewards you with efficiencies that will make a substantial difference to the profitability of your shop.