Within the screen printing business, we're all too familiar with the ebbs and flows of the workload throughout the year. Often it feels as if one's business is constantly pulled in one direction or another...too much business that's challenging to complete in a timely manner or too little business with presses and artisans that have too much idle time. These peaks and valleys are not likely to ever flatten out so it's important to use workflow improvements to optimize your business as much as possible.
The first thing to do is to identify where your peaks and valleys fall within the year. Maybe many of your customers are education related and as a result you end up with peaks before and during the school year. Or maybe your customers are more tied to entertainment and tourism where you see the spike over the summer. Regardless of your situation, you should strive to understand what parts of the year traditionally have huge demands on your business and what parts do not. Mapping this out and comprehending this is the first step in optimizing your overall business workflow as you can pre-organize supplies and batch process similar orders to streamline your operations during your particularly busy periods.
And of course once you've mapped out when your busy and slow periods are throughout the year, you can begin proactively planning for your staffing through staff augmentation and temporary workers. This will help your core staff from being overburdened and hitting burnout, while ensuring that your business runs as smoothly as possible. As we all know, staffing can often be a challenge, so if you know that you're going to have a heavy load in June, you can begin the staffing and interview process weeks or months in advance. Similarly, suppliers don't always have what you need when you need it, so ordering supplies to have on hand for future jobs can be a critical component in determining if your jobs come in on time or are perpetually late.
Then you have the periods of the year when things might not be so brisk. Knowing when these periods occur will help you plan workflow improvements, maintain equipment as well as invest in training of your artisans. Maybe your business is mostly plastisol based but you've always wanted to dip your toes into water based processes. You can easily plan for your next period of downtime to test out various suppliers and try different processes to improve the skills of not only your employees but also push the envelope on what types of products your shop is able to ship. This downtime is also a great time to gather customer feedback and begin preparing for the next surge of business.
Optimizing your workflows is an important aspect of managing seasonal fluctuations and is critical to help your shop thrive. With proactive planning, preparing to adjust your staffing levels and continuous improvement during slower periods, one can stay productive and prepared for future growth, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.