National Clothesline

There are two acronyms that you should be familiar with in your shirt department (and drycleaning department, for that matter). They are critical tools with which you can identify the areas that need management attention.

The acronyms are PPH and

PPOH. I suspect that the terms that they represent vary geographically, but the situations that they refer to are always the same. PPH refers to the number of pieces that are pressed per hour by one employee on one shirt unit or press. It always refers to one hour of time.

Your shirt department may be capable of processing 300 PPH with your three double-buck units. Each pair of your double-buck pressers presses 100 PPH. Combined, the plant capacity is 300 pieces per hour (PPH). This is an important figure to know.

We all know that there is a lot more to processing a shirt than simply pressing it and here is where PPOH comes in.

Literally, PPOH is an acronym for Pieces Per Operator Hour. That is a bit misleading because the word “operator” suggests a machine operator. PPLH would be more appropriate.

I was discussing this article with a client in Oregon last March and told him that the acronym PPOH isn’t mine to change. He responded by saying “Don, you’ve changed everything else in this business, you can change this.”

I’m flattered and I yield. Heretofore, PPOH is PPLH, an acronym for Pieces per Production Labor Hour. X-number of shirts divided by the total number of hours needed to do the entire job.

If you had one building and one employee in it who did everything involved in the production of every shirt from washing to bagging and everything in between, PPLH calculation would be elementary: How many shirts? How many labor hours? Divide the second number into the first. Voila. That doesn’t happen.

So whose hours belong in the formula? “Everybody’s” is the right answer. I begin by saying everybody (which isn’t technically correct) as a reminder that everyone’s hours need to be considered.

Are they a part of “production”? Mark-in or tagging hours are generally excluded (but charged to either customer service labor or allowed to stand on its own as a separate department) because the items have yet to enter the production processes.

The most common error is to not include the hours of people that truly contribute to production. PPLH is a measure of production labor. Excluding the hours of a production employee is simply lying with statistics. This is a costly mistake. Here is a classic example:

You have a double-buck unit producing 80 shirts per hour with two employees. They feed a single inspector/
touch-up person who, because of her work ethic, also assembles orders. She has a part-time helper.

The management perspective: “Everybody else in my management group struggles to get 20 PPLH. I don’t see what the problem is. I do 75 shirts per hour, with 3 1é2 people. That is 22.8 PPLH. We could do better, but we keep the pressers working slower than they could because we do an extra good job.”

Let me interview this guy and see what other words of wisdom we can extract.

Don: Do you think that 80 shirts per hour is good productivity?

Plant Manager: I know that they say that a double-buck can do over 100 shirts per hour, but we want a good job. If they slammed out shirts at the rate of 100-110 per hour, they would all need touch-up and I would need another employee to keep up.

Don: I disagree. Quality is not directly linked to speed. Training is. If you get poor quality at 100 shirts per hour, training will fix it, not yielding to the wishes of an employee that can not or will not use your equipment to its potential. Once you allow this to happen, correcting it can be a real challenge.

Plant Manager: I see. What else is wrong with my evaluation?

Don: I’m not sure yet. Let’s look further into your situation. Who washes the shirts?

Plant Manager: My drycleaner does that.

Don: Oh. Well, his hours must be included in your PPLH number.

Plant Manager: They do? Why is that?

Don: Because the shirts don’t wash themselves. The impulse is to not include the drycleaner’s hours that contribute to shirt production because you wouldn’t save those hours if the drycleaner didn’t have shirts to wash.

True enough. If the drycleaner works eight hours per day and you decide that he spends 1 1é2 hours per day contributing to the production of laundered shirts (loading and unloading the washer, shake-out, feeding the shirt unit(s) and perhaps other things), do his hours decrease if you get out of the shirt business or hire a separate wash person?

Extremely unlikely. He will still come in at 6 and work until 2:30. Does this make his time free?

Absolutely not. It means that the drycleaner’s labor hours are pre-paid. This is very much different from free. It means that if the drycleaner wasn’t washing shirts his/her time would be not fully utilized. This doesn’t mean that every day the drycleaner will sit on a folding chair by the spotting board for 90 minutes if there are no shirts to wash. It means that every task during the course of the day will take a wee bit more time than it should.

If this doesn’t convince you that the drycleaner’s hours belong in the shirt laundry column, consider this: when you figure your PPLH for the drycleaning department, will it then be fair to count all of the drycleaner’s hours in the drycleaning department figure? Of course not. What’s fair is fair.

Plant Manager: Ok, I agree. I need to add the drycleaner’s hours. Let’s go with the 1.5 hours per day figure. How does this effect my PPLH?

Don: 80 shirts per hour for eight hours for three people and four hours for an extra one – that’s 28 hours to do 640 shirts plus an hour and a half for wash labor. This means that you use 29.5 hours to do 640 shirts for a PPLH of 21.7 (640 divided by 29.5).

Plant Manager: Wait, the inspector/touch-up person is never done at the same time as the pressers. She usually has an additional hour and a quarter of work after the pressers leave.

Don: Good, now you’re seeing the whole picture. Now we calculate that you use 30.75 hours to do 640 shirts. This drops your PPLH to under 20.8. Some plants make it even worse by using the pressers to help with touch-up, assembly and bagging once the pressing is completed.

Plant Manager: Oh, we do that. Nobody goes home until every thing is done. That’s our rule.

Don: You mean that the pressers help the touch-up person?

Plant Manager: Yes.

Don: Uh-oh. So we need to add two more hours per day because the pressers are helping with assembly and bagging?

Plant Manager: Yes, we limit them to one hour, though, because we are watching our labor cost. And they don’t do the bagging.

Don: So now we have over an hour in the day during which we do zero shirts per hour (PPH) but are using three labor hours. Back to the calculator to add two additional hours and we find out PPLH to be less than 20. Not so good. And what did you say about not bagging?

Plant Manager: The bagging gets done in the drycleaning department, so, based on what I’ve learned, we need to subtract four hours from the bagger’s drycleaning PPLH hours and add them to the shirt laundry for the same reason that we shifted the drycleaner’s hours.

Don: Correct! Do we really want to do the math now? It must be done. Eight hours for each of two pressers (16), plus wash time of 1.5 hours (17.5), touch-up and assembly hours are 9.25 plus two more hours used by the pressers to help with touch-up (28.75) plus the part-timer (32.75) and, since the shirt orders are simply not ready to hand out to customer yet because they are not bagged yet, we need to add the four packaging hours.

We are now using 36.75 hours to do the whole job. Now your PPLH is 17.4. This is very typical, but completely out of the realm of respectable or acceptable to me. Each of these increments may not seem like much, but collectively the difference between what you thought your PPLH was to what it really is — 5.4 pieces per labor hour adds huge dollars to your payroll.

Without doing the math, which would require all kinds of labor hour cost assumptions, consider that with 25 PPLH versus 18.3 (the norm, by the way), you can process six or seven shirts, start to finish for not a penny more in labor costs, every single hour that you are in production.

Understand that by not using the correct numbers to calculate the PPLH at this hypothetical (but very typical) plant, what really is a very big problem didn’t look like a problem at all. In fact, it looked wonderful. 17.4 PPLH looked like 22.8! This is a labor waste of thousands of dollars, even in a small plant!

The only reason to figure PPH and PPLH is so that you can bring the problems in a plant into focus. These problems need to be made clear so that management knows what needs fixing and then fix them.

In the plant that I describe, there are numerous problems and it’s hard to know where to start, but it looked like nothing needed fixing, but in fact everything does! That’s quite a difference, don’t you think?

Problem number one: PPH is pathetic. 80 shirts per hour with two employees is not the formula for a “good” shirt. It is a byproduct of management oblivion.

Is this the first problem that needs addressing? Not at all. Because if production where improved, the inspection and assembly department, which can not keep up now, would be swamped still more. The back up of shirts would lead to more touch-up — or another employee to deal with it.

The method used to assemble shirts in this plant is the first problem that I see. Maybe it’s the space, the system or the staff. Not enough information at this point. But there is a problem and it needs to be corrected.

Once the assembly theater is rectified, productivity can be addressed without repercussions into the inspection/assembly arena. When PPH is corrected, then a serious look at PPLH will highlight the next opportunity on the agenda.

At every shirt plant that I’ve ever been to anywhere in the world, at least one of the following situations prevails:

1. Too many employees. This is often a direct result of management’s desire to fix a problem. Throw bodies at it. Quality issues? Add a touchup person. Can’t stay caught up in assembly? Add a helper. Bagging gets behind? Sub out the packaging to someone else.

2. There is more work left to be done once pressing is finished. Classic. Progressively, the inspection/assembly theater falls further and further behind during the course of the day. At just about the time when this department could not handle being more backed up due to space constraints, the pressing for the day is done and it’s catch-up time. Often this involves additional employees and this is the time of the day when efficiency is non-existent.

No matter who now staffs the post-press arena, or how many employees contribute, there is no longer the virtual “push” by the pressing department.

No matter how inefficient these employees are or how slowly they work, they will always get more and more “caught up” because the pressing has ended. This is where a great deal of your profits go. Disorganization throughout the day has bred calamity at day’s end.

3. Productivity, that is, shirts pressed per hour off the shirt unit, has slowed to a rate that is more in tune with the post-press area’s ability to handle it. This is especially sad, because fixing the real problem – poor productivity – will create a disaster in the assembly area, which is a problem that may seem to you to be far more dangerous and harder to fix.

The saddest of epilogues: In most every plant that I’ve ever visited all three of these situations are prevalent. Too many employees, sub-par productivity, more work to do at the end of the day and the icing: management at a loss for a solution.

Plant Manager: I’m overwhelmed! Maybe I should just leave things as they are?

Don: Aghhh! hgyvhbjuygtfvhbjnuygtfvbhnjuytgfvhbnjkiuhygtfvhbnjuytgfvhbnjugy (That’s the sound of my head banging on the keyboard.)

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