Re-prints and re-dos

This month Arron Harnden of Shirtworks muses over something close to every screen printer’s hearts – those painful words… re-prints and re-dos.

Painful because those words are loaded with costs, both financial and reputational.

Painful with the emotional downward pull that those words create.

Painful because it felt so avoidable.

Avoiding these words means avoiding making mistakes – but this is almost an impossible task in a busy workshop and sales office.

Unless you have worked in a printing or embroidery business, and almost none of our customers have, there is little comprehension to the number of possible scenarios and mishaps that can occur during an order’s journey to completion.

What we do is not rocket science, but sometimes building a rocket has got to be easier!? I reckon it has less moving parts than a print workshop.

So how do you avoid those costly words; re-print and re-do?

Well, I have no definite idea to be honest.

Along comes stupid

Because as soon as you think you have gotten on top of bad luck, along comes stupid. As soon as everyone is trained to no longer be stupid, along comes misinterpretation, and when misinterpretation has been cleared up, along comes the most frustrating one of all, failure to follow procedure.

I do understand why procedure is sometimes given the shortcut. Palmed off when the clock is ticking and replaced with a cut’n’shunt mentality.

We are all guilty of cutting corners to get it done.

That scenario where the courier is hopping impatiently as you are still printing that last job of the day that has to get to the client for tomorrow, or hell will pay a visit as they miss their event.

I do get it. Honestly… I do get it.

I have two nifty mantras to ward off these evil agitators.

1) Assumption is the mother of all f***ups

This cinematic truism from a Guy Ritchie movie, which I now forget, is the single most useful cognitive companion in a print room. If I ever find myself at that crossroads of comprehension, where I am pretty sure I am about to do the right thing, but not completely and utterly sure, I feel that this is the moment an assumption is giving birth and about to set its trap.

This automatically kicks in the companion mantra of if in doubt, check it out. These two powerful allies force me to abort my mission and seek to eliminate doubt and kill the assumption.

Whenever your staff get it wrong, you will often hear the defence ‘well he said X so I assumed Y’. It almost sounds sensible, plausible that they took that course of action, but they admit to making an assumption and this is where you have them by the short and curlies, especially if this mantra becomes your law that you live by.

2) Check and test, check and test

As a young paratooper, I noticed that the brutal simplicity of airborne soldiering basically amounted to a whole load of checking kit, testing kit, checking kit and testing kit. It ensured that things were less likely to go pear shaped when you were actually needed to perform with that kit. I now use this as my reminder to make sure I run a test print first rather than impatiently hitting the customers’ actual T shirts in a maniacal rush to get some shirts on the belt; and I use it to remind me to count my shirts and check they are the right products before printing.

The ever present danger that the procurement guys have ordered the wrong shirts, or the wholesaler has shipped the wrong colour or the picker has not bothered to do a ‘goods in check’ means that checking and testing is compulsory at every stage of the orders journey.

Underpinning these two nifty mantras is that one thing which is most difficult to enforce personally and then collectively.

Discipline

Discipline is almost an ugly word because it is just soooo uncool baby. But it is the glue that holds it all together.

I figured out long ago that it is a lack of personal and collective discipline that is the ‘agent’ involved in many of our failings.

It requires discipline to make yourself do that thing which is a pain in the arse, but is the thing that is going to ensure your survival (ok, I could be less dramatic, but you get the idea).

It is a pain in the arse to count shirts.

It is a pain in the arse to do a test print every time you set up a job, even single colour work.

It is a pain in the arse to jog to the end of the dryer or shout over the din of machinery to check that your folder and packer has tested the cure temperature of your first couple of T shirts.

It is a pain in the arse to have to mix up Pantone colours by the book and scales when you think that chucking in a bit of this and a bit of that will do.

The list goes on and on… all of them have their own tick box on a job sheet.

The biggest pain in the arse of all… is re-printing that job because you didn’t exercise that personal and collective discipline to undertake all the little pains in the arse known as procedure.

So procedure is a pain in the arse, requiring discipline to check and test constantly to avoid assumptions giving birth to f***ups.

Simple.

Happy hunting.

I would love to hear your mantras. We are all in this together.

www.shirtworks.co.uk