# Work Flow: A Quest for a Smoothly Operating Operation



## Tshirt_mania2008 (May 20, 2008)

The quest begins with a description of how we currently have our workflow.

We have a production manager who's job it is to take orders, order products from suppliers, handle order questions with customers and internal staff, and manage scheduling workflow.
Our PM has always kept things in memory and rarely writes anything down. As the owner I have instructed this person to write things onto an excel spread sheet and at the end of every day e-mail to myself. If the PM does use the excel spread sheet, it is quite often incomplete and things get dropped. When things flow smoothly we have a turn-around of about 7-10 business days for large orders and 4-7 business days for smaller orders.

The quest ends with a suggestions from industry experts who have gone through these issues.



Thank you very much.


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## Liberty (Jul 18, 2006)

How many orders per day are you handling, on average?

Having mission critical information like that locked in an employees head is a recipe for disaster...


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## Tshirt_mania2008 (May 20, 2008)

We have anywhere between 10-15 orders per day and ranges from single items to thousands of items. We are kind of a do-all shop (and get paid well for the one-offs).

We require all orders be written because we make a copy of the order form; one to production and one to billing.

With the production copy a work order stating all relavant information such as: embroidery, screen printing, DTG, or heat transfer.

Two problems we have with those: the orders written by our PM are never complete and the PM never writes a work order.
When the PM writes an order if it call for a full front it would say "Full Front Design" and never WHAT the full front design is.

We have told the PM multiple times to fill out the order completely. I hate to say this but I think it is time to let the PM go.


Any thoughts?


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## thutch15 (Sep 8, 2008)

Tshirt_mania2008 said:


> I hate to say this but I think it is time to let the PM go.


I agree... I would probably lay down the law one last time with some "Written Standard Work". Let them know that the work procedure is the standard and at any point it is not being followed that there position will be terminated. You don't want to make it a norm that you let people get away with not following work standards. The longer you go the harder it is.


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## Dan K (Nov 15, 2006)

Yes, it sounds like your issue lies more with your employee rather than your processes. If you make the effort to put in place these standard practices it is crucial to the success of each practice, therefore your whole business, that you have help that SUPPORTS your decisions. If you're PM does not do what you want, anyone else under them may get it in their head that they can behave the same way... Sounds like you are making great strides to establish your workflow. A huge piece of that puzzle will be finding a good PM who will not only support what you do, even if they don't understand why at first and it's just on their faith in you that you know what you're doing, and help pass that on to the other employees. What you need to do, is write down your SOP's and make them mandatory, hold a meeting with your people and tell them what you are going to do and how things will move forward from that day. The goal being to gain support and get things done the way YOU as the owner want them done, and of course accepting suggestions from the employees. Each time something does not get done, you progress through the disciplinary process; verbal, to written, to final written, to probation, etc... If you can't gain cooperation out of this person during or at the end of the disciplinary process, it will be clear to both them, you, and anyone else why you may have to make a decision to move on...

There are two excellent books that we've used to establish workflow. One is called "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large Scale Production" and the other is called "The Kaizen Revolution" and they work well if you read them in that order. Both are fabulous reads and they will help you establish your processes and touch on how to deal with supportive and resistant employees and everything else you could imagine.

Amazon.com: Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (9780915299140): Taiichi Ohno, Norman Bodek: Books

Amazon.com: The Kaizen Revolution (9780966354973): Michael D. Regan: Books


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## thutch15 (Sep 8, 2008)

What gets measured, get done!


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## Liberty (Jul 18, 2006)

OK, I'm curious... what do you pay this person?


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## Tshirt_mania2008 (May 20, 2008)

We are currently paying the PM position $13/hr


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## John_Sheridan (Oct 8, 2009)

Tshirt_mania2008 said:


> We are currently paying the PM position $13/hr


As a seasoned PM who has run multiple companines.. my press operators made more than this 

The two of you need to sit down and workout public production scheduling. This can be as basic as a dry erase white board with rows and boxes and different colored pens to notate order status to a complex computer program that alows input of order, art, goods and spits out a daily production schedule. 

Tell him your ideas how you want it run and then have him tell you how he wants to run it. Take parts from each and build your system. 

write it down, try it, discuss and alter until you have a system that works well for the company. 

Unless the guy is stubborn as a mule or simply doesn't have a clue to what he's doing, the absolute last resort is firing the guy. Everything else can be worked out with constructive conversation.


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## wormil (Jan 7, 2008)

Bad employees rarely improve. You could spend months in frustration trying to retrain this guy and it may or may not be successful. Long ago I learned that it's a waste of time messing around, formally counsel the employee and if they fail to improve, terminate them. The key is doing it in writing and then following through. Maintain a professional (detached) attitude during the process, express yourself with words, not with body language or volume. It's really best if you write out what you want to say and then just read it to the employee. While this sounds cold, it prevents you from saying anything stupid in the spur of the moment.

One important thing... be consistent with your counseling and don't just use it for this one occasion. Keeping written records is essential because one day you will fire an employee then have to justify yourself to some authority. I had a former employee hire a lawyer and then the four of us sat down before an arbiter assigned by the state employment commission (yeah!). Sitting in a stuffy room for hours while a disinterested arbiter asked the same questions over and over for two days isn't fun, but you need to be prepared for the eventuality. Thankfully I had loads of documentation, counseling forms, written statements from customers, etc. One other thing, they wanted to compare my record of counseling other employees with the one I fired which is why you want to be consistent with all your employees.

Another benefit of formal counseling, you'll realize quickly which employees are the most trouble by the amount of paperwork they generate. You probably know who already but the paperwork really drives it home.


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