Christmas list – December 2015

Ah, Santa Claus!  Sometimes you make me feel like I’m always asking for that mini-bike that I wanted when I was 14.  I was in denial about how totally and completely out of the question getting that from my parents as a Christmas gift that year really was.  What I want this year is really easy stuff.  I admit to having some fantastical ideas for this, my annual Christmas Wish List, in years past, but this year its easy stuff.  We can make this happen folks!

Thick buttons on shirts have been around for a while now and shirt presses can reduce these buttons to dust.  It’s so annoying.  Back in my plant days, there weren’t very many think buttons, thankfully, but if there had been, it would have been so annoying.  And it’s gotten worse.  Some shirts have three-dimensional buttons, which are simply unserviceable.

Nearly 5 years ago, I wrote a column that I titled “Funeral for a Friend.”  It was my prediction that the sleeve press was soon to meet its demise.  It wasn’t such a long-shot prediction.  Blown sleeve shirt units had already become interwoven into the mainstream.  Shortly after that column was published, Unipress stopped production of their ABS sleever (although, you can still buy a factory re-built one from them).

I am not about to predict the end of the road for another piece of equipment today, but I am here to question the value of something that you probably have in your plant right now.

One of the first adages that I really liked as a manager was “We never have time to do it right, but we always have time to do it over.”  I liked that (and still do) because it is so easy to prove correct and accurate again and again.  You can prove it almost every day.  And no matter what you are referring to, it is always easier and much quicker to just do things right in the first place, rather than starting over.

Many times we are our own worst enemy.  We cause our own problems and then spend a disproportionate amount of time undoing careless mistakes.