So it’s already December again.  And you know what that means; it’s time for my annual Christmas wish list!  I hate to admit that Santa was pretty good to me this year, but he surely was.  Several of my wishes from last year – even some from years ago – were granted during 2011.  But my mother used to say “the more you have, the more you want.”  Far be it for me to prove her wrong, so I’ll go with proving her right!  Once again I have my list of industry goodies that don’t exist, but I wish for.  I like to think that I fuel the inventor’s minds with my cornucopia of time-saving and money-saving vaporware.

Have you noticed that Unipress changed their machine colors to red and white a few years ago? Sounds a little bit like Santa Claus, huh? Makes sense to me, given how they have brought a bunch of things to our metaphorical Christmas trees lately, but of course, I’m not satisfied. Their new LS2 has a production monitor that measures shirts pressed per hour. Love it. Sort of. The LS2’s computer measures production for the last 10 shirts and then will reset itself after a period of inactivity. This is a step in the right direction, but it falls a bit short because what it really measures is ‘possible productivity’ not actual productivity. If a presser presses quickly for a burst of time, then a manager can erroneously conclude that “we press 100 shirts per hour” because 10 shirts were pressed in the last 6 minutes. Often, important decisions are arrived at using such inconclusive and trivial data. The production monitor is a great place to start, but it needs to account for all the wasted time that costs exactly the same amount of money as productive time. It’s understandable why any manufacturer would hesitate to make a production monitor like I wish for; it would show a much more discouraging production number. Imagine buying a shirt machine because the manufacturer boasts 100 shirts per hour, only to find out that their own monitor shows only 70 shirts per hour! So here is my wish: I want a 2-stage production monitor, that shows what sort of production you are doing (say, the 70 figure) vs. the possible production. It works like this: the presser clocks in on the machine to start their day. The computer calculates production in real time, and then after about 15 minutes, calculates an average peak production number based on an average of the 5 best times during the past 15 minutes. The computer now uses this number to anticipate future production. Let’s say that this number is 102.8 shirts per hour which happens to be pulling one shirt off the buck every 35 seconds. There are a variety of things that could affect that production and prevent it from being the average production for the entire day. Among them; running out of shirts, a partner that can’t keep up, equipment issues and paid breaks. So if the production monitor shows two figures - the attainable and the actual – the machine isn’t to blame. Its either management, the pressers or the circumstances. Regardless, management has a clear attainable goal, in real time.

Every form finishing type shirt press fails to dry the pocket during its normal cycle. You need to take a hot iron on the pocket while the machine is running in order to get that part of the shirt finished. This doesn’t seem right. It looks too much like a work-around. It looks too much like a way of saying “we can’t figure out how to dry this, so just use this iron while we try to figure it out.” When I dream up these ideas, I am merely the visionary. I am not the tactician, the facilitator, nor the executor. Therefore I have a right to tell the engineers: it’s time to figure this out, because this is what I want. I don’t know how you’re pull this off, but that’s not my job. Just do it.

Folded shirts are killing. There simply must be a way to keep the shirts from looking terrible after they’re folded. The shirts that I had folded in India last year looked great out of the package! So much so that I didn’t unwrap the last one for (no kidding) 10 months because I loved looking at how perfectly folded and preserved it was. Don’t make me send my shirts to Hyderbad to be pressed and packaged! The Customs delays will bury me!

Liberty-Pittsburgh introduced at the Clean Show a plastic ‘clamshell’ for protecting folded shirts, (see my September 2011 column) and I think that is a step in the right direction, but those are too large to pack in a suitcase easily and will not prevent fold wrinkles, only packing wrinkles. This is a tough one, but this problem needs to be addressed.

Westvic’s PieceCounter needs to be re-programmed to automatically populate my Tailwind spreadsheets to allow for real-time, on-the-fly analysis of any plant’s Pieces per Labor Hour (PPLH). My clients live by those sheets so therefore this enhancement would be a great marriage of hi-tech, pro-active management and careful, grass-roots production monitoring.  Come on guys. This one is easy.

And there is one last thing on my wish list. We have seen a metamorphosis during the last decade that has led to the death of the sleeve press. I see this as a good thing  but it was capable of doing something that the blown sleeve units have yet to master; the perfect short sleeve. This isn’t as hard as it seems. In order to prevent or minimize those ugly ripples on the tops of the sleeves on a blown sleeve unit, the manufacturers have increased the outward pressure to pull the sleeves with a surprising amount of pressure. But this will often pull the sleeve/cuff clamping device out of the shirt, leave the short sleeve flapping in the wind. What I want is substantially reduced outward air pressure when the short sleeve device is selected. This will allow for reduced clamping pressure necessary to hold the sleeve in place because the sleeve arms will not pull out as aggressively when you’re pressing a short sleeve shirt. 

Nothing to it. If we want to continually move this industry forward, its important to remember that…

"If you do what you always did, you'll get what you always got."

Happy New Year everyone.