SUCCESS STORIES IN THEIR OWN WORDS

those key players who really know those job functions. And then the implementation phase, and then the last part of it is the control phase, and that is twofold. One is to have, again, allow a little bit of time for the changes to stabilize, and normalize in your shop, and then measure again, and you're going to get your capacity, your high end and your low end, your average. And you're going to have a control chart. And you're going to mark on that control chart every day if you're meeting those goals and those standards you've set. Now with your data, any run of seven is a trend. So if you have a control chart with your upper limit and your lower limit, and ideally, everything's falling in between there, but you start getting seven dots in a row that are trending up, you are, you are slowly losing control of your process. And it's going to go out of control, or seven down, seven straight, you're pretty consistent and pretty good. And of course, the narrower that is, the better off you are. And so step one is to have the control chart to continue to measure whether those spot checks are continuous. And then step two is to have the plan in place that when you recognize those trends, who's responsible to fix them, and how is it going to be fixed? Because if you recognize the trend, but you have no way to correct it, what was the point of going through the whole process, to begin with? Marshall Atkinson So I know somebody sitting out there right now listening saying to themselves, "Wow, that sounds really nice but it's kind of complicated, I just want to print t-shirts." So can you give us an example of something that you've done that uses a project you worked on that was completed, that had a really nice payoff to it? So people can kind of really see exactly and understand, yes, that's why I need to do that. Ali Banholzer Yes. So we've done a couple of projects, we've done one an embroidery, we've done one in our pre-screen and reclaim. When we brought, we brought in a new piece of equipment, we brought in an auto, we hadn't had an auto before, and we brought in another so it took a little bit of time for the auto to, first of all, get used to it. And then we did some baseline data and training. And then we needed to figure out our best methods for pre-press printing how to arrange it. So some of that, for us that project was the layout of the shop. So that's the lean part of it. So what was the best layout as far as the number of steps we're taking? Where is stuff getting stored? How are we finding ink? And do we want a moving cart where the inks are always on the same cart and, and then some visual management things with clean carts and dirty carts and, and things that would? So that was part of it. But specifically, we wanted to improve our road through prep, from a blank screen, through the press to ensure that our profit margins really were what we wanted them to be. So we gathered data for essentially what how many failed screen failures we had from start to finish in the process. And we did it we were also trying to decide what type of emulsion to use. So two different brands, and what was giving us the most success. So a lot of people will look at it from the blank screen to on press failure. And they're counting the number of screens that fail on press. But that is not the whole picture and doesn't give you your whole profit margin. So we looked at how many screens from reclaiming how many screens weren't cleaning up to put emulsion on them. So that's one failure. Then once we did the emulsion, howmany screens weren't coated correctly and we couldn't expose? That second failure. And then exposure exposed to how many didn't wash out correctly, that could be a third area of failure. And then on press did it fail there? So four different points of failure. And we just tracked if we had failure there, some of themwe didn't like it, we reclaimed we didn't really have any failures of not being able to code it because the screen was like clean enough. And then as far as the emulsion coating, we looked at the time it took to coat, and then how well the coatings withheld set up for what we were doing. And so that factored in for us to make an educated decision on which emulsion we wanted to use in the shop consistently. So we did that, and then once it was exposed, dialing in exposure times for that particular emotion. And we were actually having some issues with our power washer, we had one that was just way too powerful and we're blowing screens out. So looking at all of those things, we were able to reduce what is called our roll

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