How to Set Up a Manual Print Shop

Flow diagram

Your company objective is to maximize profitability in a safe environment.  The shop
layout should be designed or reviewed to support this objective.

Costs are reduced, and profit increased, by reducing work  - that is steps
people have to take and distances material has to be moved.  The shop
has conditions that probably cannot be changed, like the location of doors.   Other
conditions may be moveable, such as the location of a power source.  A
good layout will consider all costs and conditions, and address the more
important issues first.

A good place to start the analysis is to identify what moves the most.  That
is probably shirts and other items to be printed.  Other items that
move are screens, inks, printed shirts,paperwork,  and more.

Exhibit A may be the steps in your shop from the time the shirts are received until
they are shipped.   First, we want to reduce the number of steps
and people involved to reduce handling and costs, but without sacrificing
quality.  Where are the quality control points to be preserved?

Exhibit A PresentExhibit A Proposed

If a purchase order is used to buy inventory, and it should be, the first quality
point is Receiving.  The Receiver should inspect for damage or defects,
and identify and count what  is received against the purchase order  rather
than against the packing slip.  Again, shirts must  be counted
before shipping. 

Work is reduced, as shown in Exhibit A Proposed, by the Receiver performing the receiving
duties  and segregating the garments by sales order to verify the quantity
received.  That information would have to be supplied  along with
the purchase order.  People who fold also check quality as they fold,
stack in even quantities and pack to reduce the number of people involved
in the process and to reduce the number of inventory points.  This is
the kind of cost reduction a management consultant will introduce to your
business to reduce inventory investment, people, and space requirement.

Once the minimal number of operation steps has been determined, the operation
flowchart should be drawn over a sketch to scale of the physical layout of
the shop.  A drawing on quadrille
paper will help you to visualize how steps can be saved by changing
the layout.

Two Existing Shops are shown in Exhibit A Present and Exhibit B Present.  In both cases, access
to the presses is congested.  Employees carry blank shirts to the press
to get past the obstructions.  The longest distance shirts travel in
both shops are Receiving to the press.  Both proposed drawings reduce
work by opening up access so that the Receiver can move inventory on carts.  More
inventory can be moved easier and faster by using carts to stage orders.  

The Existing Shops in A Present and B Present move printed shirts a longer distance
than necessary, and both unprinted and printed shirts are moved through a
maze of obstructions.  In the Proposed Exhibit A work is reduced by
rotating the work flow  so that it is between Receiving and Shipping.  In
the Proposed Exhibit B the dryer is turned 180 degrees around and moved left
of center to allow cart access from Folding to Shipping rather than hand
carrying piles of shirts.   In Exhibit B Proposed another door should be
created in the temporary wall so that the movement of shirts from Receiving
to the presses is a straight line.

Moving shirts is a highly repetitive activity, and therefore should be planned to
require the least number of steps and work.  A sample operations flowchart
drawn over a shop layout allowing space for bulk movement with carts will
avoid a lot of work and expense moving material.

The Existing Shops in Exhibits A and B have another layout problem.  There
are doors at both ends of the conveyor dryers.  If  both  doors
are open at the same time, the breeze may blow through the dryer taking the
heat out and making the dryer less effective.  Conveyors should be placed
at right angles to the air flow so that shirts are cured in an insulated
environment.  Shop D can open the windows and  the Receiving/Shipping
doors for cross ventilation in hot weather.  

Electric power and gas lines should run across the ceiling and be dropped down at
the point of use.  Power lines on the floor would be a tripping hazard
and obstruction for carts loaded with shirts.  If power cords are run
over or stepped on continually, damage and an electrical short may occur.

The  ventilation from the conveyor should be a sheet metal tube that is as straight as possible.  If there is a bend to vent out a window, a larger radius to the bend is better
than a sharp 90  degree bend.  If the ventilation tube is more
than 20 feet long, a small fan should be installed at the outside wall to
draw the exhaust out of the dryer.  That fan should be wired to the
on/off switch of the conveyor  so it turns on at the same time as the
conveyor dryer.  The exhaust fan prevents the exhaust tube from restricting
air flow.

Under no circumstance should exhaust air from a conveyor laden with lint from shirts
be allowed to flow out of the conveyor doors and into the shop.  Lint
floating in the shop air is a health hazard.  If lint is on  flat
surfaces in the shop, the health hazard should be addressed.

After addressing the most important work flow  -  the shirts  -  the
next major work flows are screens and ink.  Screens are prepared in
a dedicated area where water, exposure unit and similar specialized facilities
are located.  Since these will not be moved to cut work steps to the
press, movement should be made as cost effective as possible. 

The movement in the screen making area should follow the same guidelines as the
rest of the shop as much as possible.  The shortest distance to travel
is a straight line.  The exposure unit will have to be segregated, such
as with a yellow curtain that contains all white light.  Then efficient
uses of space must be developed for most shops.  For example, a drying
cabinet protects screens and allows faster processing of screens.  Back
lighting the washout tank with yellow lights assists checking the quality
of screen making.

Errors in screen making can be avoided by mounting on the wall graph paper under
plexiglass that is backlighted by  yellow covered florescent tubes.  The
frame sizes used in the shop should be drawn on the graph paper with the
typical platen traced inside the drawing of the screen.  Center lines
can be added.  Positives can then be taped over the platen drawing,
registered one on top of another, and then located on a coated screen using
the drawing of the screen.  The positive will stick to the screen with
double stick tape.  If two boards are affixed on top of the plexiglass
perpendicular to each other along the drawing of the outside of the screen,
positioning screens to positives will be very easy, accurate, and without
taking critical shop space.

The screen making area deserves special attention in the shop layout.  Dust
can create pin holes in screens and low productivity.  If the shop does
not want to use capillary film exclusively to eliminate pin holes, then the
screen making area may need a door, air conditioner, dehumidifier or filtered
air.  There should be no open windows.  This area should be wet
moped regularly, and the walls and equipment wiped down.   So surfaces
should be smooth to clean easily.

At the end of the screen making process there should be access for a cart to
be loaded with screens and positives for bulk movement to the press.  These
screens should be taped, and should have been touched up with block out,
if necessary.

Maximum productivity and profitability will be achieved, if
the press operator  has only to register screens, put ink in screens,  and print.  The
press operator should not be taping screens, using block out, fetching and
mixing ink.

Mixing ink usually results in some ink getting on hands and maybe clothing.  The
person printing must be absolutely clean of ink so the ink does not get on
shirts, except where the image in the screen allows ink to pass through the
screen.

Inks should be prepared by one person specially trained to match color requirements
of jobs and to mark recipes on job cards in the event of  reorders.  Ink
should also be mixed so that the body of the ink, or adhesive quality, is
according to the mesh count and substrate.  This specialized shop function
should be located as close to the presses as space allows so that the ink
specialist can refill screens during longer print runs without interrupting
the people printing.  When the job is done, and screens are removed
from the press, the ink specialist should recover unused ink and put it in
containers marked with the recipe.  A location for the ink specialist
near the  presses will eliminate work steps.

Lighting is important to register screens accurately and quickly.  A florescent
lighting fixture with multiple bulbs should be over  the platen where
screens are registered.  In shops with more than one press, an on/off
switch or pull chain will allow operation of lights only when a particular
work station is in operation in order to control the power bill.

The shop layout should reduce walking, bending, twisting, and reaching.  Body
movement costs money.  In shops with automatic presses that print a
shirt every 3 seconds the person loading simply takes hold of the tail of
the shirt and slides the shirt on the platen.  Then the loader reaches
for another shirt.  Manual shops should be laid out the same way.  The
shop layout, lighting, and support activities are designed to minimize downtime
to change jobs or service a job that is running.

The importance of movement on profitability is also obvious when an owner of
a screen printing business counts the number of one color shirts printed
per hour compared to one color on black shirts.  How many more white
shirts are printed than black shirts, and what percentage in productivity
per hour does that represent?  If 72 black shirts are printed compared
to 100 white shirts, the difference of 28 is a 39% increase in productivity
to print white shirts.  What extra movement with black shirts accounts
for a 39% difference in productivity?  Measuring productivity like this
will demonstrate for a business owner the cost of movement.

Work stations should be planned so that people do not look directly at each other.  Preferably
each person faces the back of another person’s head.  When people
make eye contact they usually start a conversation.  Attention is drawn
away from compliance with work procedures, observance of quality standards,
and meeting productivity goals.  When people are distracted there will
be more mistakes and a greater chance of an accident.  People can face
the same direction, but should be separated sufficiently to make spontaneous  conversations
improbable.

The person printing could be 5’1” or 6’5”.  The
person’s height in relation to the platen should be reviewed as a source
of personal injury and fatigue.  If the angle between a person’s
extended arms holding a squeegee and the platen is less than 45 degrees,
personal injury to joints like elbows and wrists can occur.  A raised
platform should be provided for a short person to stand on.

The influence of the shop layout on operations can also be analyzed using a document
flowchart.  The destinations of each copy of each document used in the
business are recorded like an operations flowchart, and then over a shop
layout to look for unnecessary document copies, unnecessary stops along the
flowchart route and other movement or work that reduces profitability.  Any
more steps than shown in Exhibit E for a purchase order should be questioned.  If
a business fails to have these documents, confusion and errors will occur.

A similar approach should be used with sales orders so that art, screens and
ink are prepared on time to meet commitments with customers.  The ink
specialist, for example, needs to know days before printing is scheduled
what ink will be required in the event ink must be ordered.  Carts
of shirts and screens that cannot be printed, because there is no ink, can
cause congestion, low productivity and high costs.

The shop layout is not just an arrangement of the equipment and furniture.  The
layout should reflect the most efficient movement of material and people
to reduce work, errors and the chance of an accident or injury occurring.  A
little time devoted to analysis, flowcharts and drawings to scale will pay
large dividends.