Tips for Better Screen Printing Workflow Management
Getting more business for your screen printing shop is a great feeling. When you’ve got a steady amount of orders coming in, you know that your business is in good shape. Everyone wants loyal customers that keep coming back, as well as the chance to bring in new clients. However, print shops can quickly get overwhelmed handling the amount of work they have to do. This can lead to stress for your entire team, as well as the risk of disappointing clients with mistakes if you miss deadlines or rush your work.
Meeting deadlines without feeling a huge amount of pressure might seem impossible at times, but it’s something every print shop can learn to do. Follow these tips for better screen printing workflow management.
Track How Long Work Takes
If you’ve been working in screen printing long enough, you probably already have a good idea of how long it takes to complete each project. You might know roughly how much each project should take, but unless you’ve actually taken the opportunity to see exactly how long each thing your team does takes, you can’t be certain. The first thing you should be doing to improve workflow management is to track how much time everything takes to complete. This ensures that you know exactly when a project will get finished by, so you know whether or not a due date is realistic.
Encourage Communication Between Teams
Communication between different teams and departments can be hard to manage no matter the size of a print shop. If there’s poor communication between teams, a business will always struggle with workflow management. It may seem like each team’s work is independent, but everyone affects each other and the work being done within a print shop. Everyone needs to stay updated with what other teams are doing and where they are in the process to ensure things are running smoothly. There are a number of different ways for print shops to improve communication throughout the whole company, including holding regular meetings or using a reliable messaging app that everyone can access.
Prioritize Each Day
Each day in a print shop can be a whirlwind, especially when you have multiple different deadlines approaching. Before you even start your day, you should take the time to sit down and look at everything you have going on and figure out what needs to be done first. A key part of good workflow management is completing the most important tasks before starting others. This prevents something important from being forgotten about until it's too late. Not only should you be putting the most pressing tasks first, but you should also prioritize getting your most difficult tasks done first. We can all get into the habit of pushing some of our hardest work to the side when we don’t feel up to tackling it. Get your most difficult tasks done first so you don’t leave them until the end and risk not having the time to complete them.
Make Everything Available Digitally
Even for print shops, there’s no reason for important information to be saved in physical copies. Papers can get lost or damaged, and many people involved in a project might be left out of receiving important information if everything isn’t easily accessible. Some people might prefer having everything in a physical copy, but everything should still be saved digitally where everyone can view it. Anything from calendars to order should all be available digitally. This ensures that nothing will get misplaced and everyone will have access to the information they need.
Get the Right Workflow Management Software
There’s a lot that your print shop can do on its own to ensure that work gets done on time, but you can’t do everything all on your own. If you want to perfect workflow management, you need to get the best software that’s meant to help print shops. shopVOX can give your screen printing business exactly what it needs to reduce stress for your team and provide customers with high-quality and reliable service.
Learn more about how our workflow management software can help your business.