Does your company participate in a daily “blame game”?

You know, where the expected outcome didn’t happen for some reason and the crooked finger of discontent points to someone as the reason.

“It wasn’t me!”

It may look like a battle of wills. The Sales team jumps into an aggressive stance against Production. Maybe the Receiving team has some questions about the decisions Purchasing makes. The ownership mistrusts the Management team.

It puts the fun in dysfunctional.

The common term for this is a “silo”. Maybe not so much a grain silo, but more of the nuclear variety.

Stop The Excuses

Have you heard these excuses before?

• “That job has to go today, and the screens are not even burned yet. It’s the art departments fault. They should have busted out those seps two days ago.”
• “Hey, we’re still missing 20 mediums for that school order. We shouldn’t have ordered from that other warehouse. Why can’t purchasing just make things easier?”
• “I know we are booked to over-capacity, but the overtime is too high. I don’t care what it takes, drop this expense. We are having a cash-flow problem and the OT is killing us.”
• “We don’t have any 156 mesh screens ready to expose. Nobody is bringing these to reclaim. Why can’t the press crews help out?”
• “This order won’t go out today as the shipping information still isn’t in the system.  Why wasn’t that info entered, to begin with?”
• “We didn’t get that order as that customer went with someone cheaper. There’s nothing we can do. They bought it at basically our cost.”
• “Nobody has time to clean up? Are you kidding me? We’re just trying to get everything produced!”
• “This is the best artwork they have. Our customer can’t get a vector logo from their marketing department.”
• “We aren’t buying that special ink for digi-camo! It’s too expensive. Just learn to print better.”

There are thousands more I’ll bet. The goal of this article isn’t to list excuses, but to provide an outline to help you navigate those rocky shores.

Let’s take a look at why these happen and what your shop can do about eliminating blame game excuses from the daily vocabulary.

First, What Is A Silo?

A silo is a highly destructive barrier for your shop to operate as a team.

The behavior exists when each department sees themselves as their own tribe.

It’s us vs them.

For example, it’s easy to play the blame game in a workflow process. Customer Service or Sales hands undefined work to the Art Department. They push questionable results onto the Screen room and then Production. Or digitizing to embroidery. Maybe even onto the digital printing or sublimation squad.  It’s like a bad game of post-office from when you were a kid.

These teams all see themselves as the “middle-man” in the process, with little control on the input. They go as fast as they can to keep up.

When nobody asks their opinion or connects the dots between what they do all day and the end result, they end up feeling marginalized. Passing the buck becomes easy when you feel like you aren’t being heard. Fingers point when intentions don’t work out.

Frustration builds silo walls.

Maybe more training would help. Better or newer (or even functioning) equipment. More team members doing the work. Different tools to use to solve the problem. Even more specific instructions or information could help.

Look for a solution.

The Blame Game Starts With Your Leadership

If your shop is a battlefield of turf wars, this wholeheartedly is a leadership challenge.

Want to stop the blame game?

Start with how you communicate your shop’s long-term vision to your Management team.

What are you doing and where are you going?

The trickle-down effect for when people you’ve hired to run your shop don’t have alignment with a common vision, then the people that work for them will be lost too.

One good place to start is to think about how each step along the way for an order adds to the completeness of the whole.

It is the sum of its parts.

No team is more or less valuable than another. There isn’t a hierarchy. Everyone is valuable. All effort must be exerted towards one thing: completing the order on time, with quality, and making the customer fantastically happy.

That’s it.

When breakdowns occur and staff starts playing the blame game, the entire company fails.

Start With Why

Can you identify what isn’t working? What is causing this frustration for your teams?

For example, let’s say the biggest problem you face most days is that orders aren’t shipping on time. In fact, a good chunk of what’s on the schedule is several days late.

Sales have a lot of angry words for production. Production passes the buck to other departments. There is a lot of tension in the air. Nobody is happy. Everyone shows stress.

Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!

Let’s start with the obvious question. How did you get to this point?

Work backward.

Was there one point somewhere this year where there wasn’t this tension and animosity? I’ll bet then, everything was on-time and working as it should.

Can you list what changed?

What Makes a Difference?

Without visiting your shop or even talking to you I’d say it was a few things probably.

• The Sales team may not understand the Capacity and the Velocity of how the shop operates. There is a “production schedule”, but this isn’t usually accurate and sales may not even understand it. They just book jobs without regard to what’s slated to go. This means that it is easy to overbook days, especially during the “busy season”. When things go out as intended when the shop is slower, that is because the amount of work booked matches what can possibly be achieved in a day. It’s just luck really.
• Along the way, there could be some roadblocks to hitting the date on time. Inventory may not be available. Art may not be approved in a timely manner. A piece of equipment may break. Maybe a key employee is on vacation or sick, and nobody is trained to do their job at the same level. When this happens, do the dates adjust? Do your operational hours adjust? What happens? Do you even have a plan?
• There is an unexpected domino effect when one job has a problem. For example, you wanted to print four or five jobs on Press 1 today. In the morning, there is a problem with the screens for an order and several hours are lost while the art and screen problems are sorted out. The press sits idle. Now, at the end of the day, only two jobs were completed. Multiply this problem times a few presses over a few weeks, and suddenly you are forty-two jobs behind.  Ouch.

Work Towards The Payoff

Taking some time and understanding the root causes of your troubles can pay off if you invest the time to eliminate these from your shop.

Why are you having these issues? Can you name them?

If so, can you circle back as to why they started? What can you do to solve them?

For example, has your shop done a good job at establishing how much work can be produced in a day? Is this public knowledge? What happens if you are at 100% of this level for next Thursday? Can you add another job to that date? Do your crews need to work later?

What happens and why?

The Worst Phrase Ever

Have you heard this in your shop?

“But hey, we’ve always done it this way!”

Maybe that is your problem.

That phrase is the head cheerleader at the blame game. Want to be mired in mediocrity? Keep saying it!

The best way to eliminate excuses, build a better culture, and drive real organizational change that matters is to involve your team in the solution.

Want to solve that scheduling nightmare?

Just ask your team, “What are the top reasons why orders don’t ship on time.” My guess is that they can list these in about thirty seconds or less.

Everyone knows the reasons. The problem is that nobody is brave enough to make the changes needed.

Are you?

Have The Courage To Change

This might mean a new system. More equipment. Using a different product. Adding a second shift. Working Saturday. Figuring out the new technology. Hiring people that know what they are doing. (**Ahem…maybe a change in management too. Especially when the problems never go away.)

Maybe even appealing to a better class of customers. You need alignment here too.

Why not book more jobs that make better sense to your shop, than the ones that are unprofitable or have a negative effect on your workflow? That ridiculous 10 color job for 36 pieces that sales booked at basically cost might not be a good of a job as reported. (Who is digging into those type of challenges?)

Engagement

Employee involvement will start making them act and talk like a team. The culture you want focuses on continuous improvements and solution minded suggestions that are openly discussed and acted upon. Even better is when non-management team members are thinking about this stuff and pushing for change. That won’t happen if they don’t feel like they are being heard or taken seriously.

Are you stifling growth because you have “control” issues?

Get out of your own way!

Results Oriented Solutions

Think about how a sports team works. It doesn’t matter how amazing the athletes play unless the team is constantly scoring. That’s the only measurement that counts. The team with the most points wins.

How does that happen?

If you have a superstar on the team, are you guaranteed a victory?

Nope.

Plenty of “inferior” teams outperform “better” ones that just rely on one individual to make all the plays. You’ve seen this I’m sure.

What happens when all of the team members work together in unison towards a common goal? That’s where the magic happens.

Without those finger pointing silos, your team can do this. When people blame others for what didn’t happen, nothing gets achieved.

Results happen with alignment.

Not just internally with your team members, but with your customers too.

Have you clearly defined all expected outcomes in exact, easy-to-understand-language that everyone agrees on?

Are you sure?

Teamwork Starts With Information

“Knowledge is Power”.

In your shop, think about your communication on orders. Is it easy to find the answer to a question, or do your employees have to “go ask” someone to move to the next step?

Are you transparent in your goals for the month or quarter? Are you talking constantly about what matters?

Do the actions of your team align with the direction to achieve those goals?

Can each department easily handle their part of the order without talking to anyone else? Does anyone ever have to stop and ask, “Hey, what’s this mean?”

If you want better teamwork and fewer silos in your shop, one excellent place to start is with how your company handles information. You should be encouraging collaboration and creativity. Can your teams use the information that is available to solve their own problems? Do you let them?

One question I’ve asked owners or managers that always seems to spark a great conversation is this one. “Can your shop function when you are not there?”

Breaking down silos and stopping the blame game is not an easy task for any company. Having quick and easy access to the right information for your teams to understand how to resolve their challenges and act as a team is the right first step.

Scheduling Nightmares

For example, let’s look at that scheduling nightmare in regards to how the sales team operates.

When they have instant access to the right information, in this case next Thursday’s schedule, they can make better decisions with your potential customers. Let’s pretend that this day is already booked up.

Do they know the problems that are caused when that new order is just thrown to the top of the pile for Thursday? Could they add it to the day before or day after? Can any of the jobs be moved to another day without disrupting things too much? In talking to the customer, do they even care if it is handled on Thursday, to begin with?

The key is that the information is available for them to make a smarter decision. Get everyone trained to understand it and what to do.

Once the Sales team stops dogpiling jobs on top of an already booked production schedule, the walls of the production silos begin to crumble. Remember, it is the frustration with one group to another that keeps the blame game going.

Providing and then understanding accurate information pushes for better teamwork.

Time Management & Silos

In your shop, I’m sure it feels like there never is enough time. Even with projects that seem months away, you turn your head and suddenly they were due yesterday.

It’s easy to get off track. Especially if your departments are playing the blame game constantly as to why something won’t work right.

What works better is when you add the teamwork component into your system, where one department’s focus is on helping another handle their workload.

Move Faster

Upstream, what can one group do to help another move faster?

• For instance, Purchasing ensures that the packing lists include the Work Order number on them so the goods will be checked in and applied to the right order faster.
• At order entry, someone double-checks the shipping address, zip code, and check for residential or commercial as part of their job so the Shipping team doesn’t have to handle that.
• The Receiving team opens up all of the polybagged inventory so that the Production crews don’t have to do this and they can only concentrate on decorating.
• Customer Service specifies which thread color to use for tonal embroidery instead of just putting “use one shade lighter” on the instructions.
• In Screen-print Production, have the print crews card off all of the ink as much as they possibly can so that the team in Reclaim can process the screens faster. This includes pulling off the tape and removing gobs of ink around the screen frame.
• Bring all of the shirts, screens, ink or cones of thread, samples, work orders and art mockups to the workgroup that is running the job.  Nobody should ever go searching for something they need to run the job.  It’s all delivered and staged in the order the jobs need to be run.  I call this idea “kit-packing”.  Make it simple for your crews to do the right thing.
• Have Production bring completed orders to Shipping so they can concentrate on the detailed work of getting orders through the system. Ensure that everything scheduled to ship today is ready by lunch.

Again, there are a million things that can make a difference. Just one tiny instance of one department helping another will have a cumulative effect on the entire operation.

Breaking down silos means helping someone else out.

Make it easier.

Breed The Culture of Winning

Shops that are at the top of their game don’t have silos. Their culture is all about winning.

Victory for them is happy customers. They do what it takes to make this the norm.

The shop down the street might offer cheaper prices, but they can’t replicate your winning culture easily. This is a marketplace competitive advantage.

You simply outperform everyone because of your awesomeness. That takes teamwork and the will to win.

The question is, “Are you winning your marketplace?”

If not, what are you going to do about it?

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“Winning is a habit. Unfortunately so is losing.” – Vince Lombardi

“The secret to winning is constant, consistent management.” – Tom Landry

“The thrill isn’t in the winning, it is in the doing.” – Chuck Noll

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Production Manager Tool

From day one, we’ve been devoted to making InkSoft the most useful tool for printing and customization professionals across the industry. While thousands of users are growing their businesses with InkSoft Stores and the Design Studio, we know we still have a lot of work to do to help print shops run more efficiently.

The next big step is a production management tool. We want to bring InkSoft full circle by providing a powerful way for you to streamline production and communication, ultimately boosting profitability and reducing costly mistakes.