National Clothesline

Perhaps you will be looking into

shirt equipment for the first time at the Clean Show in June. (You are going, aren’t you?) How do you know what to buy? It’s possible that you won’t take a salesman’s word for it. And maybe that’s a good move (or not).

I have developed an accurate mathematical formula that you can use to determine your capacity and/or how much equipment you’ll need.

The first figure that you need is your weekly shirt volume. I am not interested in daily totals. I’ll explain why in a minute.

If you find this figure a challenge to acquire, there are a couple of back-door methods. Your POS system can help you with this. Ask for a report of total shirts “racked” in a one week period. If you can’t get that, but you know that you do, say, 500 shirts per day and work five days per week, you will calculate your weekly shirt volume to be 2,500 shirts. That’s elementary.

The reason that a daily figure might not be accurate is because it usually isn’t real. Everybody knows that some days are busier in retail than others. It is extremely unlikely that you take in 500 shirts per day and process exactly those shirts daily.

What is likely to be happening is one of three things:

1. You work for a specific number of hours per day and, as a direct result of that, you begin work on the following day’s work on a regular basis. This is a fine practice. You under-promise and over-deliver. I couldn’t give better advice.

If you are in this group, you probably aren’t worried about how much equipment you need, but you may be interested in how much volume you can handle without crippling your extra-ordinary service record.

What is the breaking point? You may be thinking of opening another store. How much more shirt volume can you handle before you must ante up for more equipment?

2. You are only capable of doing X number of shirts per day. Service will suffer if you “get slammed.” Oh well. It’s tough to give good service at the start of the week because of the weekend’s intake, but it all works out in the end.

My uncle was in the shirt business before I was born. He called Thursday “catch up day.” That’s the day when you finally aren’t backed up anymore.

3. You flex the “promise” date on your shirt orders. Some computer software makes this pretty easy. You promise for a certain day until you reach a pre-determined quota and then you begin promising for the day after that. At least, this keeps promises from being broken.

This might be viewed as a “work-around.” I think that a customer expects same-day or next-day service (if that’s your routine) and couldn’t care less about the logistics involved in making that happen.

If you do this, you have come up with a way to work within the confines of your equipment’s capabilities. Suppose your competitor offers 24-hour turn-around? How will you compete?

There isn’t going to be an urgent need to calculate your capacity most times, but I suspect that given certain sets of circumstances, you will need to know sooner or later.

Can your equipment handle more volume with a new store opening? What about a home delivery route? Will it breed more volume than what you’re currently capable of? Maybe you are downsizing. You have three old shirt units that need replacing. With today’s volume and modern equipment, what fits the bill?

The next thing that we need to agree on is employee overtime. You can’t have any. We need to work within the borders of a 40-hour work week and an eight-hour day.

You may disagree with my conclusion regarding the amount of equipment that you need if you work 12 or 16 hour days. And this may be fine for you. It was for me at one time. I ran a plant that operated 7 a.m. until midnight, Monday through Wednesday, until 10 p.m. on Thursday, then a mere 11 hours on Friday and a half-day on Saturday.

This was necessary for me and may be for you, too. But my formula was important to me then, too. It helped me schedule my employees. You’ll see how.

Back to the components of my formula. We have total weekly shirt volume. Now we need to determine total hourly productivity. Use production numbers that you are comfortable with. Whether they are fair and reasonable is a subject for another day.

If you think that two people on a single-buck who together do 30 shirts per hour is fair, then go with that. I don’t think I need to tell you what I think of that kind of production. Your P&L saves me the trouble.

If you look at new shirt equipment and the sales guy says that “you’ll get 120 shirts per hour” but you don’t buy it, then, for the purpose of this month’s exercise, go with a production rate that you are comfortable with. Let’s say that your total productivity rate per hour is 100 shirts.

So now we know three things: Total shirts (2,500), productivity rate (100 per hour) and then some math will tell you that you can do those shirts in 25 working hours.

The quirk here is that you certainly know that this does not mean that you’ll work 7-12 Monday through Friday.

This simply isn’t that kind of business. You will get a plurality of your shirt volume on Monday and Tuesday because of the retail influx on the weekend. And remember, all of the shirts need to be done within eight hours time for service and payroll reasons.

The magic number is 55 percent. On Monday plus Tuesday, you will do 55 percent of the entire week’s volume.

The exceptions are when you offer a discount on shirts during the middle of the week or when your routes somehow alter the influx of work. In those cases, you probably don’t ever wonder about capacity because it’s rather obvious. So, 55 percent is the part of the formula that I provide.

Let’s write an equation:

2500 x 55% = 1,375.

1,375 shirts is the number of shirts that you will get over the counter that your plant will need to process on Monday and Tuesday combined. That’s a bit fewer than 700 per day. This is a far cry from 500, but it fits within the limits of a eight-hour workday.

So what is the weekly capacity of a plant that can produce 100 shirts per hour? If you think that it’s 4,000 shirts, you haven’t been paying attention.

We have to work the formula backwards now. You know that you’ll want to do a maximum of 800 shirts per day on Monday and Tuesday for a combined two-day total of 1,600. You aren’t going to plan on overtime.

The formula (in English) is: what number is 1,600 55 percent of? Got that? In algebra, that is. (Remember in high school when you told your algebra teacher that you weren’t going to need algebra in your adult life?)

Number of shirts that you can produce in two eight-hour days (1,600) times 100 percent divided by 55 (the percentage that this two-day total represents. That’s it.

1,600 x 100/55 = 2,909 shirts

2,909 is the number of shirts that you can process in a five-day work week and not get into overtime.

I met a man several years ago who had, literally, tons of shirt equipment. Five units. He needed two, but somehow ended up with a double, a single and three all-in-one units. He no longer had the volume to feed all this equipment.

Just for fun, let’s figure his capacity. Three all-in-one’s with a capacity of 37 shirts per hour each, a single buck with a capacity of 50 and a double buck unit with a capacity of 95 shirts per hour. His total hourly capacity is 37+37+37+50+95=256 — 256 shirts per hour.

This may or may not be a true capacity. Remember that we are going with a number that history shows is do-able. Arguably, this “capacity” could be calculated at 50+50+50+60+120=330, but we’ll go with a more conservative figure. Over a 16-hour period (two eight-hour days), this plant can press 4,096 shirts.

The number of shirts that can be produced in two eight-hour days (4,096) times 100 percent divided by 55 (the percentage that this two-day total represents: 4,096 x 100/55 = 7,447 shirts

Let’s say that you are sending 3,800 shirts per week to a wholesaler for your six stores. It’s Clean Show time and pink-slip time for your shirt man. You’re eyeing a double-buck that “they” say will get 120 shirts per hour.

You figure that this is too lofty, but are sure that 3,800 shirts can easily be done in a 40-hour work week. After all, 3,800 shirts over 40 hours is a mere 95 shirts per hour, which is 25 percent less production than “they” suggest.

Let’s see what you really need for shirt equipment: 3800 x 55 percent = 2,090 shirts during the two busiest days. You will need to be capable of pressing 2,090 shirts in the 16 work hours on Monday and Tuesday. That’s 130.6 shirts per hour.

This is where you can make a critical mistake. The sales guy said that you’d do 120 shirts per hour, so you go with the double buck.

Hmm, if you think that isn’t attainable with your employees, perhaps you should figure again. If you think that you can produce 120 shirts per hour, but don’t, you may drop the ball with regards to service.

Here’s where you need to evaluate your own ability to manage and to train employees as well as the quality of your staff. Sure, you can work overtime a couple of days a week. But how much sense does that make? There’s math for that, too.

Using the last scenario, and the productivity rate that YOU believed was do-able (95 shirts per hour), you will need to work 11 hours on Monday and 11 hours on Tuesday. That’s six hours of overtime for each employee in your shirt department. Let’s say that you have a crew of four. That’s 24 hours of overtime.

Assuming that your state requires you to pay overtime for more than eight hours in one day, that will cost you in the vicinity of $250 extra per week, every week — $13,000 per year. Admittedly, not every state requires this, but you probably require that your shirts be ready by 4 p.m. That’ll be a challenge.

Buying the right amount of equipment is far cheaper than overtime or, even worse, late deliveries and lost customers.

“If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got.”