National Clothesline

This business is all about getting the most out of every labor hour that you buy. It all boils down to that because labor is our most significant expense.

As much as utilities have gone up in price during the last year or so, that cost still pales by comparison. This does not necessarily mean that you must get 125 shirts per hour on your

double buck, but it does mean that 60 shirts per hour with two people is sucking you dry.

When I make first contact with a new client, I always ask about production. This is not because I plan to address production issues early on, but because I am trying to get a feel of the inspector/assembler’s work load. Are they working 40 shirts per hour? Or 100?

Sometimes the query about shirts per hour gets a good answer. Something in line with what some consider to be the norm. “Each presser does 50 shirts per hour,” or “We get 100 shirts per hour on each double buck.”

When I get to a plant in person, the reality is different, but nobody really lied. The production numbers are attained, but not over the long haul.

I like to monitor production hourly. This may seem like micro-management to the nth degree, but it is important, at least early on, in order to find problems. Suppose your production manager tells you on Friday at 3 p.m. that “we didn’t have a very good week. Production was down.”

Finding out that production was down at 3 p.m. on a Friday is not a very useful stat because it comes to you 39 hours too late! If you had been aware at 8 a.m. on Monday, then you could have done something about it.

So, because of that, I will look at productivity on an hour-by-hour basis. Here’s what I see sometimes:

Between 7 and 8, production isn’t that good. The staff wasn’t ready to work at 7. Half the staff was late by 5 to 15 minutes. When the pressers were at their battle stations, still their wheels spun in the mud. It was 7:20 before the first shirt came off.

Between 8 and 9, production isn’t that good because everyone is eyeballing that 8:50 coffee break. At 8:45, productivity has ground to a near halt. We expect that production will be off during break hour, but by a realistic percentage. If a break is 15 minutes long (a quarter hour), production should be off by 25 percent. It is often down 40 percent. More on breaks later.

Between 9 and 10, production isn’t that good because the catering truck comes. Everybody in the plant disappears. Even though it’s just to buy a cup of coffee. “Hey, I can’t stop them from getting some food for lunch” is the official stance of management.

Between 10 and 11, production isn’t that good. People are getting lethargic as hunger sets in. At least they put in a full hour’s work.

At 11:30, it’s lunch time. We still can’t measure, with certainty, how many shirts we press in an hour. By noon, the shirt staff has been “on duty” for five hours. Has this double buck pressed 450 shirts in 4.5 hours? It is less than 300. Production is off by 30 percent.

At noon, the staff leisurely rolls back to their press stations. Half of them are late. They had to stop at the restroom after punching back in. Consequently, production isn’t that good between 12 and 1. At 10 minutes to 2, its break time, so the 2 o’clock reading isn’t that good either. Motivated by the thought that its almost quitting time, everybody kicks butt between 2 and 3. Full staff, full production, 100 shirts in one hour.

”What’s our production? We are right at 100 shirts per hour on our double buck.”

Are you sure about that? Lying to yourself about your actual productivity is foolish.

What’s fair is fair. Rarely have I found the need to crack the whip when it comes to pieces per hour, but I never let the employees run the show either. Goal-setting and monitoring is far more effective.

So, here are three easy ways to ruin your productivity.

1. Keep the pressers oblivious to what you expect. Don’t confuse them with goals.

2. Leave them alone. Don’t pay any attention to them, except on payday.

3. Allow your employees to come and go as they please, weaving in and out of their station at will.

If you put your mind to it, production ought to be in the toilet in no time. But, of course, I say this with my tongue firmly implanted in my cheek.

The only reason to keep production figures is to know where you are. The only reason that you need to know where you are is to help you determine where you need to go and how to get there. If you want to get to San Francisco, but you don’t know that you are in Wichita, you are not getting to San Francisco. You have to know where you are in order to make a path to where you want to go. This is management 101.

National Clothesline columnist Bill Bishop has an excellent program that accomplishes this in the press room. The Shirt Production Maxi-Miser sets goals for pressers, monitors their progress and creates permanent records of their work (invaluable at pay raise time).

But suppose that your pressers have been programmed to think that 50 shirts per hour on a single buck is unrealistic. This is when the IFI’s Quality Shirt Finishing Video comes in. During a full 15 minutes of that video, my friend Brian Johnson presses 13 shirts in real time. Watching Brian press for 15 minutes might be sheer torture to many of us, but the value of it is real.

If you think that your pressers doubt the plausibility of pressing four or five dozen shirts per hour, they need to see someone from outside the plant doing it. This will remove all doubt that 50 shirts per hour is not only possible, but quite easy to obtain.

It is quite likely that your presser works harder than Brian does in that video. His rhythm is the key. (By the way, 13 shirts in 15 minutes might sound like 52 shirts per hour, but it isn’t. If the video ran for 60 minutes, Brian would have pressed 54 shirts. He presses one shirt every 67 seconds).

Your presser should notice that Brian isn’t working up a sweat, running, huffing and puffing. So now we have set realistic goals and proved their attainability (IFI Video). We have paid attention to them by posting graphs and making the pressers clearly aware that we are familiar with their contributions of plant productivity and are ready willing and can afford to compensate them for their efforts. (Production MaxiMiser)

All we need to do now is keep them from strolling off their press stations.

Believe me, making them aware that you are not oblivious to their productivity is 75 percent of this. A client in Texas had a serious production issue early last year. I implemented something similar to Bill Bishop’s Production Maxi-Miser.

By the time I returned in December, you can not imagine the difference in the pressers’ mindset. Quality was still a major goal, but in order to be profitable in this business, quality and productivity must go hand-in-hand. One without the other will not make for a profitable company.

So what can we do about the part of problem number 3 that doesn’t take care of itself: Allowing your employees to come and as go they please, weaving in and out of their station at will?

There are a surprising number of things that can be done to keep employees focused on their goal of pressing shirts:

1. Appoint someone in charge of making sure that supplies are stocked for the day.

It isn’t going to take much to have, say, the washman, restock every press station with a full day’s supply of hangers. Usually, this is nothing more than a full case (already cut open and good to go), plus the current open “working” case. Same goes for poly rolls, hangers at each drycleaning press station, staples, twist-ties, etc.

Whoever stocks these things now (even if it’s you) has to do them on a moment’s notice. Giving them a checklist of stock levels to maintain at each job station is not only professional and proactive, but will be a boost for production without really working at it. Pressers will never need to leave their station to tell you that they need hangers or to get them. I’ve seen some pressers run out of hangers and not say a word about it — completely shut down their press station and fold their arms. Pathetic.

2. Make it someone other than the pressers’ responsibility to keep the damp box stocked with shirts.

The best production in the world turns shameful when a shirt unit shuts down for 15 minutes to restock the damp box and shake out shirts. Maybe the wash person can do this?

3. Restructure the coffee break schedule. One of the more innovative things I came up with as a plant owner was to give a ten-minute break every two hours and to make every hour 55 minutes long.

Confused? Pay close attention and you won’t be for long. I have monitored hourly production for years. I still have hourly production sheets from ten years ago. When I first started doing it, the graph would look something like this:

a. 7 to 8 a.m. — 100 shirts pressed

b. 8 to 9 a.m. — 100 shirts pressed

c. 9 to 10 am — 70 shirts pressed.

I’d inquire about the dip in production between 9 and 10. The pressers would say “well, that’s break hour.” Meaning that’s the hour during which there is a ten-minute break. Duh.

My inquiry would have been better stated as such: Break time is for 1é6 of the hour (ten minutes), therefore production should be off by 17 percent. Why is it down 30 percent?

You know the answer. Graphs are most pleasing when they show slightly inclining straight lines. Spikes aren’t good. They are invariably preceded by and followed by dips.

If my goal was to do 100 shirts per hour, that didn’t mean 100 in one hour, once a day. It meant 800 shirts in eight hours. If I was going to have a ten-minute break every two hours and still average 100 shirts per hour, I would need to do 109 shirts between 7 and 8, 109 shirts between 8 and 9 and 83 shirts between the shortened hour between 9 and 10. Total: 301 shirts in 3 hours.

Cool. So would I tell my pressers that I needed 109 shirts per hour? Or could I say I wanted 100? If they did 109 after one hour, would they under-achieve the next hour because they were “pressing too fast?”

The work-around: Make every hour 55 minutes long and give a ten-minute break every two hours. This makes the expected productivity a straight line. It works like this:

7 to 8 a.m. — Ok, that is 60 minutes, but since there are no shirts completely pressed until about 7:05 (It takes Brian Johnson three minutes before one shirt is pressed in the IFI Video), this hour is 55 minutes long. At 8 a.m., whatever the count, that was accomplished in 55 minutes.

8 to 8:55 a.m. — 55 minutes. At this point, it is break time. Check the shirt counter on the shirt press and record it. This is the number of shirts pressed in 55 minutes. Break begins at 8:55 and ends at 9:05, sharp.

9:05 to 10 a.m. — 55 minutes. How many shirts during this hour?

10 to 10:55 — 55 minutes. At this point, it is break time again. Check the shirt counter on the shirt press and record it. This is the number of shirts pressed in 55 minutes. Break begins at 10:55 and ends at 11:05, sharp.

The same pattern continues throughout the day. If lunch bisects the day, simply shift the afternoon breaks 30 minutes.

Now you’ve got it made: Production off the unit is where it should be because goals have been set for the employees (Production MaxiMiser).

The goals set are in your favor. They aren’t dictated by what a presser wants to do, they are dictated by what the equipment, coupled with what a qualified employee should be doing (IFI video). The daily and weekly production reports contain straight lines, thanks to reworked break times.

Just make sure they are back from break on time, okay?