National Clothesline

When you go to the Clean Show, surely you will be looking at shirt pressing equipment. Everybody does.

If you don’t do shirts, you wonder whether you should reconsider and you wonder why the shirts that come back from your wholesaler don’t look like the ones being pressed at the show.

If you do your own shirts, you probably wonder why your presser doesn’t produce as fast as the demonstrators at the show and why your shirts don’t come out as well.

One thing is for sure, there are more brands of shirt pressing equipment now than ever before. There are still plenty of offerings from the major players like Unipress, Sankosha and Forenta, but now there are new entrants, brands that you never heard of.

I will try to help you make a decision this month. I cannot make the choice for you, of course, but hopefully I will give you a new point of view.

The first thing to know is what your weekly volume is during peak season. This is critical in determining what type of unit that you need. So let’s make up a couple of examples.

2,000: We do this many shirts per week

.55: Volume multiplier — this is the percentage of your total volume that you will do on Monday plus Tuesday.

1,100: 2000 x .55 (this is your factor) This is the number of shirts that you will do on Monday plus Tuesday in order to give your customers typical two-day service.

550: Your factor divided by two. Because your factor (1,100 shirts) is what you will do in two days, we can estimate that half of that is Monday’s work and the other half is Tuesday’s work.

69: This is one day’s work (550 shirts) divided by an eight-hour day. This is the number of shirts that you need to do per hour in order to avoid overtime hours.

4,500: We do this many shirts per week.

.55: Volume multiplier — this is the percentage of your total volume that you will do on Monday plus Tuesday.

2,475: 4,500 x .55 (this is your factor) This is the number of shirts that you will do on Monday plus Tuesday in order to give your customers typical two-day service.

1,237: Your factor divided by two. Because your factor (2,475 shirts) is what you will do in two days, we can estimate that half of that is Monday’s work and the other half is Tuesday’s work.

155: This is one day’s work (1,237 shirts) divided by an eight-hour day. This is the number of shirts that you need to do per hour in order to avoid overtime hours.

In example number one — the case of doing 2,000 shirts per week — you need to do 69 shirts per hour in order to get by without overtime and/or long days at the beginning of the week.

I know that a double-buck unit might sound like overkill for volume at this level and it’s not what you thought I would recommend, but let me give you the big picture.

If you go with a smaller, less expensive single buck unit, you will do 50 shirts per hour. It will take 40 hours at that production level, to press all 2,000 shirts.

That’s not so bad, and 50 is surely quite attainable. But problems loom. This is much too close to overtime. Don’t flirt with overtime! Overtime is deadly. It is where all of your profits are.

For a refresher about just how bad overtime is, read my article in the February, 2008 issue of National Clothesline: www.natclo.com/0802/desrosiers.

Or go to my web site, www.tailwindsystems.com and follow the links: Trade Journals >2008 > Overtime.

Or buy my book Labor Pains & Profit Drains at www.Xlibris.com/Bookstore or www.amazon.com and read pages 26 through 39.

Regardless of your path, you aren’t going to read anything much different from “avoid overtime!” (You know me. I find a way to say that using 2,000 additional words.)

If you buy a machine that puts you on the cusp of overtime, you put yourself in danger of drastically increasing your labor cost per shirt for life. The simple flowchart at right shows how this happens.

I know that you’re probably a better manager than that and you would never let that happen, right? Well you are the anomaly. It happens everywhere else.

Why flirt with disaster? Buy the correct machine! It will save you buckets of money in the long run. Remember, nothing is more expensive than labor. And you will pay off the machine eventually, but the cost of labor will go on forever!

The logic is the same regardless of your volume. And if it’s close, err on the side of buying a bit heavy.

Easy for me to say, right? It’s not my money. Well, actually, I treat your money like it is my money.

In case you need a bit more convincing, let’s take a minute to look at the cost of equipment vs. the cost of, say, a lease payment.

If a single buck cost $30,000 and a double buck costs $40,000, the lease payment for the double buck comes to about $215 more per month. ($860 vs $645). That is less than $50 per week.

For a $10-per-hour employee getting overtime pay ($15/hr), that is barely more than three hours of overtime per week.

A double-buck over a single buck is practically worth its ample weight in gold if it can keep you out of the hellfire of overtime.

And don’t forget that it won’t be just the presser that will get overtime! The touch-up person, the assembler. Ouch! It could get ugly.

In fact, there is a good chance that your shirt department is staffed with five people. If each of them gets 41 hours, well, there you are, well over your three hours of overtime for the week.

So the lesson is: do not under-equip yourself. The cost of the equipment is a one-time hurdle. The cost of excess labor goes on forever.

Blown sleeves or pressed sleeves? I have been non-committal on this issue for years, but in the final analysis, my personal shirts are pressed on a blown-sleeve unit and I think that I am rather particular. I have no quality complaints.

I have reduced the decision-making process to one singular issue: the skill level of your production manager. There will be training issues. There will be productivity issues. How skilled is your production manager at training employees? How skilled is your production manager at tackling productivity issues?

These issues will be especially prevalent if you are switching from pressed sleeves to blown sleeves, or vice versa.

And what about brands? Hmmm. Are you more comfortable with a Toyota or a Daewoo? And are you more comfortable buying beef from a butcher or out of the truck of someone’s Buick?

“If you do what you always did, you'll get what you always got!”