Let’s talk about Production Leadership for a bit.

For this article, I’m going to use the metaphor of running a circus for the daily production grind in your shop.

Mainly because sometimes it really feels like one. I’m sure you can relate.

Here’s why…

At the circus, there is a lot going on at once. It’s big and loud. Many things call for your attention constantly, so it is easy to miss something.

Occasionally, we’re so focused on getting the clowns squeezed into that tiny car it is easy to lose attention to the acrobats flinging around on the trapeze at a million miles per hour.

That’s exactly when gravity kicks in for the Flying Squeegees high up at the top of the tent when they miss the triple durometer backflip with a twist.

Oooh. That’s gotta hurt.

In your shop, there are always multiple tasks being completed simultaneously too. Similar to a circus, is your production leadership targeting the attention on the crazy clowns too much? While you do one thing, disaster strikes across the shop floor on something else.

What are some best practice ideas that might help you become a better ringmaster for your own circus?

Let’s take a look.

Production Leadership – The Ringmaster

For starters, let’s get the notion of control out the way.

It’s an illusion. You don’t have it.

What you can control are the inputs into your process that can feed your shop’s success.

When things start or stop. How the process works. What products or consumables you use. The training that goes into learning a skill. Even who are the clowns and acrobats that are under your big tent?

To drive that next level success that everyone is always talking about you have to have engaged production leadership.

A ringmaster.

Think About What You Need

Want more success in your company? It starts with a leader that can communicate the vision.

The key is with constantly pushing your people towards excellence. Knowing when you are doing a good job, and conversely when you aren’t.

Leaders control the influence and journey for the shop. When something needs to change, they determine the new path.

Always with Big-Picture thinking.

Managers vs Leaders

Managers direct the daily work. Need that job approved or some issue resolved on the floor? These are the folks that do that.

They keep things moving. Like sergeants in the army, a solid core of managers ensures that the staff is working properly.

But managers aren’t always Big-Picture thinkers. Leaders focus on what matters and why. Managers target the how.

How would you describe who is running the show on your production floor? Do you have a manager or a leader?

Choreography – Plan to Eliminate the Chaos

In a circus, how each act transitions to the next one are strategized and planned. It is all about timing and coordinating the efforts of each different group of performers.

When they do it right it’s seamless.

For shops, it isn’t much different.

The choreography between jobs is crucial to getting more work out every day. That gap from when you stopped the last job to when you start another is called downtime.

Nobody makes any money with downtime. The river of cash only flows when garments are getting decorated.

Your goal every day should be to eliminate as much downtime as you possibly can.

Quick question: Are you even measuring this?

What percentage of yesterday’s production where you are actually decorating a shirt for each piece of equipment on the floor?

Shop Choreography

For starters, think about how you organize jobs. Start with the simple stuff.

Is every box labeled with the Job Name, Work Order Number, Ship Date, and if it is part of a group of boxes? (Box 1 of 2, 2 of 2, etc.)

Print a 4″ x 6″ label and place this neatly on the upper left-hand side of the short side of the box. This way all the labels will line up vertically when the boxes are stacked.

Next, group all boxes for orders by the last digit of the Work Order Number. Anything ending with a “6” will be placed in the “6” row. Jobs that end with a “3” will be in the “3” row.  And so forth.  This makes any job ridiculously easy to find.  Staging by due dates is just asking for extra work.

Then, stage every single order in your shop to the workgroup that will produce it the day before it is to run. Line them up in the order they need to be produced. For screen-printing, bring over all the screens and ink. For embroidery, find the cones of thread. The group of boxes for each order should all have the Work Order, Art Approval Forms, and even samples if they were produced earlier.

Staging

Tomorrow’s jobs are staged today.

Always.

Make it easy to the do the right thing by having your production leadership set your crews up for success a day early.

What you want is each workgroup has everything it needs to run the next job. Then, their workflow is only three things:

• Setting up the job.
• Running the job.
• Taking down the job.

The choreography of your shop floor pushes all of the work material to the workgroups that are actually doing the work.

Your screen-printer should never be in the screen room looking for that underbase screen. Your embroiderer shouldn’t be looking for that cone of 1508 Red thread.  The DTG machine operator doesn’t have to search to find any shirts.

When your production crew doesn’t have to waste any time “looking for something”, you’ll be surprised how much more they can produce in a day.

Timing – Work Backwards

They say “timing is everything”.

Certainly true in a circus. More so in your shop.

To be able to pull off those amazing feats of wonder under the big top, circus performers strategize and plan every minute detail. The timing has to be perfect.

Drumroll, please.

When the trapeze artists swing toward each other, one performer will ultimately be in the exact position to catch the other one when they are rocketing towards them in a somersaulting ball.

Ta-Da!

Hear That Same Applause In Your Shop

In production, it works the same way.

You can’t print that job until the screens are burned. Nothing will be embroidered until the file is digitized. The digital printer is useless until the shirts are pretreated.

Do you struggle with getting these tasks ready so jobs can ship on time?

When the sales guy screams at the production manager because that order has to ship today, does production point a crooked finger to another department in your shop as to why they can’t start yet?

If this sounds familiar, maybe you should create some timing standards for your shop. That way you’ll be in a perfect position when the drumroll starts.

Shop Timing

This happens when you work backward with each task. There are many processes in a shop, but let’s take a look by outlining just one as an example.

• A 500 piece, 2 color front, 3 color back order has to ship on Friday.
• To ship on Friday, the job should be finished on Thursday.
• In order to be finished on Thursday, the job should start printing one of the locations on Wednesday.
• To start printing on Wednesday, the screens need to be burned and the shirts received by Tuesday.
• For the screens to be burned on Tuesday, the art needs to be approved on Monday.
• To get the art approved on Monday, the job has to be sent to the client last Friday.
• For the art to be created by Friday, the order has to be entered on Thursday.
• If the order is entered on Thursday, then the shirts can be ordered so they can ship and arrive by Tuesday.

What Are Your Standards?

For your shop, do you have established standards for tasks that coincide with the ship date? For things to work “like clockwork”, you need to have these tasks built into each departments workflow so everyone knows what to do.

The most important bit of information on a Work Order is the Ship Date. Every motion in your building revolves around that date.

For “normal” orders, what is the percentage of on-time shipments?

What about “rush” orders? Do you have a special process that denotes what has to happen? Can you take one of these without having a special meeting?

When there is a delay due to art not getting approved or a problem with the inventory, does the ship date move? Are you working until 2:34 am to get the order out?

The more you get in the habit of doing things early and helping other departments succeed, the better your on-time scheduling results will become.

Like with trapeze artists, timing matters.

Practice – Get Better By Doing Things More

I’m sure there are some people out there that just started juggling the moment they picked up three balls and flung them up into the air. I’ll bet they make great circus performers.

For the rest of us mere humans, mastering that skill takes hours of practice. And a lot of dropped balls. Some people, (like me), have never learned despite trying.

In our industry, conquering the ever-changing landscape of decorating apparel requires the same dedication as learning to juggle.

Nobody just picks it up and is perfect immediately. And in juggling, you might know how to do it with three balls, but what about eight? What about bowling pins or running chainsaws? Maybe something on fire?

For decorated apparel, it is the same. What’s the equivalent of juggling a bunch of flaming, running chainsaws?

Maybe printing white ink on a red polyester shirt from some unknown knockoff brand from Vietnam. You know the one that comes in the crushed boxes and every shirt is individually polybagged?

Yikes.

Staff Practice

Here’s another thought. Does everyone get the same practice in your shop?

Sure, you might have a staff member or two that really knows what they are doing and can handle those flaming chainsaw orders.

But does everyone? How many on your team are even trying to learn the basics?

You can’t handle those insane tricks until you have success with the basic level stuff.

Get more people juggling.

Clowns Don’t Tame Lions

Nobody expects the clowns to jump into the ring with the big cats. In a circus, the people with the right skill sets handle specific tasks.

Sounds a lot like our industry too, doesn’t it?

From all the years I’ve been in this business one thing I know is that not everyone is capable of doing all of the tasks well. Some people are naturals at it.

Others struggle no matter how many times they try.

Here’s a tip that I learned a long time ago though. If someone has a great attitude and truly wants to work and learn, even if they can’t handle one particular thing well…you can move them around until they find their right niche in the shop.

Someone that struggles with screen-printing, might make a great embroidery machine operator. An employee that is hired for the screen room could hate that job, but excel in shipping.

In the landmark business book “Good to Great”, Jim Collins talks about not only getting the right people on the bus but in the right seats.

Remember clowns don’t tame the lions.

How Do You Know?

First, look at their overall quality of their work. You’ve spent some time training them. And hopefully, they are catching on.

However, there are some people that no matter how many times you show them how to pull a squeegee that just can’t get it right.

Does that make them disposable?

They could be just in the wrong position. If your department leadership is any good, they are having conversations with their team during the day.

One thing that should be coming up is information on the employee’s goals and aspirations. What are they good at doing and where do they see themselves in your company?

Here’s Where Cross Training Comes Into Play

If you are subscribing to the Rule of 3, where you cross train enough staff so that every core task in your shop has at least three people who are fully capable of executing the job…this might be an audition for someone to take over that skill on a permanent basis.

Cross training sometimes surprises even the employees that participate.

They didn’t know that they would be good at, or even enjoy, doing something until they were given the opportunity.

Then, they take to it like ducks to water.

You just have to give them the chance.

Spotlight On Confidence

In the circus, performers that are not totally ready don’t get the spotlight. They work in the wings honing their act until they are ready.

In your shop, it might work the same way.

Giving your staff training and time doing different work enhances their confidence.

Everytime you let that team member run the machine, even if it is at half speed, they are building their confidence in that skill.

Top Request

One of the top requests I get constantly is from shop owners wanting to know where they can find more trained employees.

The shop wants to add another shift or they are buying another machine for production.  Unfortunately, they are in an area where there isn’t a big pool of candidates.

That’s when I ask about their training program. Almost always they don’t have one.

If you want to be ready when you add to your equipment infrastructure, get your staff trained to jump in when that time comes. Being prepared sometimes isn’t instantaneous.

Once you build that, you’ll have more people ready for the spotlight.

Production Leadership – It Doesn’t Just Happen

If there is one thing I want to impart to you with this article that would be that production leadership doesn’t just mysteriously appear.

Either you have it or you don’t.

You can tell if you have been to enough shops who has great production leadership just by the way thing run. It’s a culture thing.

Happy, well-trained and satisfied employees work harder and faster than those left to managers that don’t see the big picture.

Your shop production leadership is 100% responsible for making their employees a success. It is not the other way around.

This requires a lot of thought. Good interactions. Maybe even questioning the processes.

• How can we do this better?
• What do you need to make this job easier?
• If you could change one thing to make your job go faster, what would that be?

To have a well-choreographed circus, you need a Ringmaster that is interested in controlling those situations.

That way, the applause you hear will be deafening.

.

“Just because you have the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.” – George Carlin

“Some people are born to lift heavy weights, some are born to juggle golden balls.” – Max Beerbohm

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” – John F. Kennedy