That same old mistake – again
hy are mistakes made in spite of our efforts?
Every now and again, we stumble upon an error of some type in
the shirt department. How can that be, we ask ourselves? We
have seen this before and have established some sort of
procedure to prevent it from happening. Why does it happen
again and in spite of our efforts?
I could answer this question with
a simple phrase “Because we have humans working for us,”
but that would be unfair. We already know that that is the
reason. Better phraseology then, would be “How do we beat
human nature to the punch?”
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But, if we look too carefully, we
seem to slip back rather than creep forward. During an
analytical moment, our shirt department seems to be the poster
child for counter-productivity. The shirt department looks and “feels”
better when we view it from afar. Perhaps that is why shirts
rarely get nurtured, but rather are tended to when a “fire”
erupts. It is safer and more productive. After all, if we
looked too closely, we would never have time to do anything
else other than shirts.
Let’s name three typical
mistakes, as examples, and try to figure out why they happen. I
may not be able to rid your plant of this error from this desk,
but I’ll surely give you a new angle from which to look
at the problem. These problems may or may not be issues in your
shirt laundry, but either way, they are put forth to serve as
examples and may well apply to other shirt department problems
and issues.
Our “typical” laundry
has 1) a shirt with wrinkles pressed into the cuffs, 2) a shirt
order with a mistake in it — a tag that doesn’t
match the master tag, and 3) a shirt with rough-dry, wrinkled
areas on both sides of the shirt.
If a customer brings any or all of
these shirts to your personal attention, you are likely to
flip.
“Why do I have a cuff and
collar press? To mangle a cuff like this?”
“The blind girl must be
doing assembly today!”
“What do I have inspection
for?”
Keep in mind that these are not
necessarily the reasons for these problems in your plant, but
they are put forth to get you to start thinking in a different
manner.
Let’s think about the
wrinkled cuff first. How can that get by an inspector? Because
nobody looked, that’s why.
Obvious and invisible
When I first ran into this
problem, I was sure that the pressers themselves would catch
this mistake. I considered that when the head of the press
releases, clearly exposed in plain sight is a collar and two
cuffs, hot and freshly pressed. Any pressing error will be
obvious.
For some reason that I can’t
explain, they aren’t. I have personally pressed shirts
improperly — some kind of seemingly obvious pressing
flaw, somewhere — and didn’t see it until it was
off the press. I don’t know why, and I don’t care.
But I do know that it tells me that self-inspection is not
possible. I agree that it sounds like it should be possible,
but from my desk, I say that a presser inspecting his or her
own work has not been proved possible.
The next possible cause of
mistakes getting by is what I call “routine”
errors. Let’s say that the sides of the shirts are not
pressed properly and they are sent to touch-up/inspection.
The reason that the sides are like
this (this time) is that the shirt is bigger than the buck. The
sides are touched-up properly. All is fine. When this problem
rears its ugly head again, it is now because the air bags on
the body press need replacing. Each bag has a six-inch tear in
it and the bags barely inflate at all. Shirt after shirt, now,
has “defective” sides.
Every shirt needs touch-up. Only
the worst ones get touched-up. That means that if the shirts
come off the unit with fairly high standards, shirts go to the
customer with even higher standards. If the shirts coming off
the unit are very poor, it is accepted in the interest of
remaining “caught up.”
The reasoning, shamefully, is that
“we don’t have time to touch-up every shirt.”
Somehow that turns into we touch up no shirts.
Hopefully, you are certain that
this doesn’t happen in your plant. I suggest that you not
be so sure. It happens more often than you think, maybe when
you’re not looking.
Double trouble
The next way to make mistakes is a
real heartbreaker. Two people making the same mistake or the
same mistake being made twice by the same person. It happens
most often when referring to tags and sorting and assembly.
If you suddenly find yourself in
the middle of numerous sorting errors, you will crack down and
demand that the person that bags the shirts (or the
drycleaning) recheck all of the tags.
Does this work? Theoretically,
yes. Practically, not necessarily.
I think that the problem is that
not enough mistakes will be made, even with the most haphazard
system. Even the dopiest assembly system will give you
something like 99.9 percent accuracy. That sounds pretty good,
but it is actually quite poor. It means one “lost”
garment for every 1,000 pieces processed, or two claims in the
drycleaning department and two more in the shirt department
every week. Nobody is that bad.
To the “checker”,
though, it means that order after order is assembled correctly.
Assuming that every order has five pieces in it, the checker
will need to meticulously check 200 orders in order to find one
that has an error in it. It gets monotonous and the checker
wonders why on earth you insist that the orders be checked.
Because the checker’s
mindset is that the orders are usually correct, one of two
things happens: He/she skims them without truly checking each
and every tag, or they make the same mistake that the assembler
made. For instance, let’s say that an invoice is calling
for tag number 1/658. But the staple, or pin or plastic
fastener through the tag makes a “0” look an awful
lot like an “8”. The assembler makes a mistake, a
mistake, in fact, that I consider to be relatively common.
He/she puts a piece with tag number 1/650 in the order,
thinking that it is indeed 1/658. Next, the checker is thinking
about 1/658, expecting to find tag number 1/658 — and
repeats the error.
These are tough problems to
contend with. The solutions are not easy and the issues
themselves are gut-wrenching. No one ever said this was going
to be easy.
By the way, I hate to say this
(really), but the Tailwind Shirt System does deal with these
three problems and comes as close as any system does to
eradicating them.
Donald Desrosiers has been in the
shirt laundering business since 1978 and is a work-flow systems
engineer who provides services to shirt launderers through
Tailwind Shirt Systems, 867 Spencer St., Fall River, MA. He can
be reached by phone at (508) 965-3163 or by e-mail at tailwind1@mediaone.net and he has a web sites located at: www.tailwindshirts.com and www.dondesrosiers.com