Eight top tips to speed up your embroidery production

Many things can affect your embroidery production so Amaya Sales UK’s managing director, Peter Wright, has put together eight top tips that should help you improve on your current position.

Remember that machine downtime can cost you hundreds or thousands of pounds of lost profit and in some cases you could lose customers by letting them down.

Tip 1

Machine maintenance: Make sure your machines are regularly maintained up to the manufacturers’ specifications. Most of this you should be able to do yourself but I would advise on having a trained engineer from the supplier at least once a year.

Tip 2

Thread breaks: These are the most common cause of machine downtime. If they are happening on a regular basis it is very important to find the cause. A machine in good working order should have very few thread breaks. Things to check:

i) Check the condition of the needle and its positioning.

ii) Check the bobbin tension.

iii) Check the thread path is correct.

iv) Check the condition of the thread. Old thread could cause problems.

Tip 3

Thread Tension: This can affect consistent running of your machine and the finish product. If the tension is too tight you will have a higher rate of thread breaks and possibly with under thread showing on the top of the embroidery. If the thread is too loose then you will probably see looping on the top of the embroidery. Using a machine with auto tensioning will solve this problem and drastically reduce the amount of thread breaks and your downtime.

Tip 4

Framing: Make sure you have framed up your next run in advance, you should have at least two sets of frames per size. In this way one would be on the machine and the other one waiting for the other one to finish. In this way the machine is only standing for seconds. Also you should have enough staff to feed your machine so as not to have down time waiting for framed garments.

Tip 5

Optimise your work area: Make sure your goods in, goods out and framing area are adjacent to your machinery and have a good workflow without obstructions.

Tip 6

Digitised design: Test run your new designs to make sure the run free of thread breaks and do not contain too many stitches. Stitches on top of each other and a heavy density can cause thread breaks and downtime.

Tip 7

Design input: Make sure that new jobs/designs are in place to minimise downtime. Some machine systems now have a barcode system that will enter information from the worksheet directly into the machine.

Tip 8

Modular embroidery system: Consider a modular embroidery system which will drastically cut your downtime and make you whole operation much more efficient.

Please, just take a few minutes to look at your setup and see if you can make any changes. I promise you that taking the time will be worthwhile.