How to Survive a Nightmare of a Week!

SHOP MANAGEMENT

How to Survive a Nightmare of a Week!

By being prepared, having backup parts and cross-training your staff, your shop can persevere at a time when it's facing nothing but challenges. August 29, 2011
By Greg Kitson, Contributing Writer

Every decorated apparel business owner experiences the ups and downs of running a company that relies heavily on computers and equipment, vendor punctuality and — most importantly — its staff. While a shop may have an off day with a late T-shirt delivery or a key employee who is out sick, not many enjoy a full week — yes, five straight days — of pure frustration.

This is the story of my own personal experience during a week from hell and how I survived it. It was one of those weeks where every time I thought that nothing else could possibly go wrong, it did. Despite having the worst luck of my 30-plus years in business, we managed to get through it without order delays, upset customers or loss of anyone’s personal sanity.

For those who aren’t familiar with me, I pride myself on being very organized, running an incredibly tight shop and being as prepared as possible for worst-case scenarios. During this particular week, I was never more thankful for my Type-A approach because, without it, this particular week would have been an outright disaster.

Our nightmare of a week took place in September 2010. It typically is not a booming month — perhaps our third or fourth busiest of the year. We do a good amount of business in this month, but it does not compare to May and June. Historically, September is manageable and predictable, although this particular week was the antithesis of both of those words.

Since the economic recession hit in 2008, we’ve been working with fewer staff and driving home the mentality of doing more with less. Now that the economy is regaining some stability, we’re seeing our September business grow back to pre-recession levels. However, we still have fewer employees than we did at that time.

We also have kept and gained customers thanks to our first-class customer service and consistent promise of a delivery turnaround of two to three days. Before the recession, we averaged a three- to five-day delivery time. So, we’re back to doing pre-recession volume, but with fewer staff and at a quicker pace. However, we are managing this without compromising our customer service or our quality.

We started this particular week fully staffed, but our primary embroidery operator and vinyl cutter had been approved for paid time off that Wednesday through Friday, cutting us down by one key employee. However, other employees are cross-trained to take on a vacationing staffer’s usual responsibilities.

Our orders for that week included 40 to 50 of our typical jobs each day — nothing out of the ordinary. While we were prepared for last-minute orders, quicker-than-normal turnaround times, and customer confusion regarding pick-up days and times, we never could have imagined the cluster of problems and influx of eleventh-hour orders we experienced that week.

Problems and Solutions
The Monday of that week began without a hitch. We were fully staffed and running two production crews for a 7,000-piece, multiple colorways order. Suddenly, I heard an explosion from one of the automatic presses that I happened to be loading. We checked it out and realized the machine had a blown seal on a stroke cylinder, which does not happen often. In fact, this was only the second stroke cylinder we’ve blown in 13 years.

To keep production running, we disconnected the cylinder air lines, crimped them over with clamping pliers, and moved the screen to another print head. We had a spare cylinder, but the actual removal and replacement was done during down time at a later date. In all, we only lost about 10 or 15 minutes and were all happy to have dodged the bullet of not having the spare part and having that press completely out of commission. However, this incident set the tone for the rest of the week.

That Monday and Tuesday, we had very complex personalization orders come in unexpectedly. Though our key embroidery and vinyl cutter operator would be out Wednesday through Friday, we knew we could handle it thanks to our very capable staff.

The orders involved several personalizations in different places on each garment; so instead of running 100 to 150 names per day as we typically do in September, we were now looking at running 300 per day. Although it was going to eat up more time than we usually plan for, we knew we could handle it and accepted the order.

Tuesday was mostly uneventful, though our production coordinator had an emergency that kept him out of the facility for a few hours. This put us a little behind, but we knew we could make up for the lost time on Wednesday.

On Tuesday night, unknown to us, Microsoft rolled out a flurry of computer system updates. When all of my staffers shuffled in and tried to turn on their workstation computers Wednesday morning, not one would work. We have about 20 computers, and none could be turned on. As all of our embroidery, vinyl cutting and direct-to-garment machines are directly hooked to computers, this problem was more than a little setback — it was a complete nightmare.

The additional downside to this challenge was that our IT guy was the backup employee for the vacationing embroidery and vinyl cutting person.

After hours of inspecting the computers, he discovered around noon that the anti-virus program was battling with the Microsoft updates, and this had disabled the computers.

Putting the backup plan in place, employees did as much work as they could from paper. I purposely — stubbornly — avoided going completely paperless for just this type of emergency. Luckily, a lot of our production was not slowed down, and orders were stacked in piles instead of being entered into our computers immediately. Once computer access was restored, it was business as usual. This situation could have turned catastrophic, but we were prepared.

At this point, we were shaking our heads in disbelief at the amount of bad luck thus far. But the worst was yet to come.

A few hours after the computer situation was resolved, the same IT guy was attempting to change out the knife in the vinyl cutter when the knife holder broke. While we have backup knives, we did not have a spare knife holder.

We did, however, have a backup cutter. It was a Stika table-top model, which is designed to do license plates and simple transfers, not lots of letters and numbers. He made it work, but instead of cutting 50 to 100 names an hour, it could output only 12 an hour.

One stroke of good luck was that our supplier had a knife holder for this 10-year-old machine plotter/cutter model and was able to get it to us by Thursday. So we only had to run at the reduced cutting rate for half a day.

We have since added another production speed cutter to our facility, so we never have to go through that terror again.

The Other Shoe Drops
While wondering what else could possibly go wrong, I looked out of my office and noticed two press operators doing prep work in the middle of the day, which was unusual. When I asked them why, they informed me that they’d blown a stroke cylinder on the other automatic press.

Incredulous, I asked if they were referring to the blown stroke cylinder we’d already dealt with on Monday afternoon. No, it was the other automatic press. I was in complete disbelief. In 13 years, I had experienced only two blown stroke cylinders, with the second one having just occurred. Now within two days, I experienced my third. The unlucky coincidence was simply astounding.

We did a diagnosis and discovered we needed to replace a MAC valve on the stroke cylinder supply lines. As we are well equipped for most unexpected situations, we did have the parts we needed to fix the press. All in all, we lost only an hour while we dealt with this second press issue.

But Wednesday wasn’t done with us yet.

Toward the end of the day, we received a call from a customer asking if he could pick up his order for 100 hats and 100 embroidered sweat shirts on Friday morning. The schedule was checked, and this order was on our books for the following week.

Somehow, a miscommunication had taken place, and now we were looking at one day (Thursday) to embroider 100 hats and 100 polyester fleece sweat shirts (which aren’t easy to handle), and our regular operator was gone. We also didn’t have enough thread in the color we needed for this particular job.

Jumping into fix-it mode, we ordered the thread to be priority shipped from two sources to ensure that one of them would have it to us by Thursday.

However, Wednesday had one more crisis to deliver. We were running four transfer machines to cure and dry production from the two digital direct-to-garment printers. As one of the transfer machines was turned on, a switch on the back broke.

At first glance, this seemed like it would be an easily fixed problem. We simply relocated a heat press from a different department to the direct-to-garment area. The heat press was turned on and it wouldn’t work, despite having worked just three minutes prior in its original location.

The troubleshooting process began and we found a safety switch proximity magnet had fallen off the machine due to the vibration caused by the relocation. It was stuck to a part inside the machine. With a little super glue, were able to re-attach it.

That’s how Wednesday ended. Thursday and Friday would be focused on catch up and, thus, required overtime hours.

Thursday Trials
We’ve been working for some time with a large Detroit motor company on T-shirts for a charity initiative. We were used to getting several orders each week for personalized pink T-shirts that have the foundation’s logo, as well as custom names and messages.

On Thursday at noon, we received a call from the firm’s ad agency letting us know that the company executives were having a meeting in New York that next morning, and that they wanted 14 shirts with special artwork put together and shipped to be in New York at 8 a.m. Friday. Wanting to keep this client happy, we agreed to this job — which is a direct-to-garment print — and were able to have the shirts on the UPS truck that same day and leaving our facility at 4:30 p.m.

Thankfully, that was the last of the unexpected orders, mishaps and near calamities we experienced that week. Though that week could have resulted in several days of delivering disappointing phone calls to our customers with delayed delivery times, we were prepared for each and every curveball thrown our way, and didn’t have to make one call. We were, however, scared to answer our phones after a certain point out of fear of what could go wrong next.

How It Ended
Though that second week last September was one of the worst in my experience as a decorated apparel business owner, we still came out of it with happy clients.

The reason we overcame the problems was because we were prepared, had backup parts and had staff properly cross-trained. Now that we’re on the other side of that nighmarish week, I recognize just how important those three traits are to my business, and how valuable they make my shop.

Murphy’s Law summed up states: If anything can go wrong, it will, and at the worst possible time. We’ve experienced Murphy’s Law to its most extreme firsthand, but are happy to report that we survived — in fact, we even flourished. September 2010 was one of the best and most profitable months we’ve had in years — even compared to pre-recession Septembers.

Greg Kitson is the founder and president of Mind’s Eye Graphics, Decatur, Ind. For more information or to comment on this article, e-mail Greg at greg@mindseyeg.com or visit mindseyeg.com.

Hear Greg speak on apparel decorating topics at the 2011 Imprinted Sportswear Shows. Individual seminars are just $25 if you pre-register: issshows.com.

RECENT HEADLINES