ver the last two to
three years, there is a particular facet of the shirt
laundering business that I have carefully avoided writing
about. I can not continue to ignore it because it is so
important. I have consciously avoided it because I never want
this column to appear to be a 2,000 word commercial message. I
am, of course, referring to tagging and assembly procedures.
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No, I’m not going to come out and
tell you which system is best. Frankly, you will have no
problem drawing that conclusion.
About 16 years ago, I worked at my
father’s drycleaning and laundry plant.
One of my jobs was to mark in shirts. We
used an automatic tagging/stapling machine. It was called
“Tag-o-lectric”. This contraption would print, cut
and staple a tag all within the blink of an eye. In some
respects, it was a mechanical marvel. Only when it broke down
did its description call for more colorful adjectives. I
remember having it apart many times.
Nonetheless, it had its advantages. It was
fast, for one thing. It had flexibility, for another. The tags
were printed with four user-selected digits.
The idea was to make “lots”
and label them lot AA, then AB and AC, etc., all the while
using consecutive numbers within the lot to identify the
individual orders. You also had the option to change the paper
tag material to different colors.
Bit by bit, I developed this tagging
method. It was fun. I liked being able to make the system do
what I wanted it to do. We used to do about 2,000 shirts per
week back then. We did shirts for about 10 to 15 other small
cleaners. It was my baptism into shirt wholesaling.
Obviously, none of these customers were
“heavy hitters,” but I don’t suppose I knew
any different.
Over time, I flexed the Tag-o-lectric so
that it would give me information just by looking at the tag in
the shirt. The first letter in the four-digit code identified
the store from which the shirt came.
For example “V” was Valet
Cleaners. The second digit was either the letter
“F,” meaning that this order needed to be folded
or, if the order was to be returned on hangers, the second
digit was the number of shirts in the order. “On
hangers” was understood when the second digit was a
number. The last two digits were simply sequential numbers.
Ultimately we ended up with tags that read
like this: VF 14 (Valet Cleaners, check the ticket for the
number of items, fold the shirts, order #14) or G6 65 (Globe
Cleaners, an order of 6 shirts, order #65). All of the shirts,
plus the invoice, will have an identical mark.
Tag-o-lectric, I believe, is the
grandfather to many of today’s automated mark-in systems.
In many ways, it resembles Polymark. The tags are printed as
you go, with identical tags on the ticket and the shirts. The
tags are affixed to the shirts. The machines even resemble each
other in that they have a handle-type of device on which you
hang the shirt while the tag is printed and attached.
The coding of the digits on the two
devices is similar as well. Polymark has a couple of clear
advantages, however. Long ago, Polymark knew that stapling a
paper tag through a garment is gross and opted instead to fuse
a cloth tag to the fabric.
Furthermore, Polymark had some vision that
I have yet to see on another system. They have a built in lot
size of 15 orders. This is important for two reasons.
First of all, it forces the user to modify
the lot “number” after order number 15, therefore,
after AA15 is marked in, that lot is completed and the user
must change the lot number to AB 1. Having small manageable
lots is important.
Second, by using only the integers between
1 and 15, inclusive, an assembler can not transpose numbers.
This is a big plus. No one can misread 13 and 31 because there
is no 31. With my old Tag-o-lectric, 34 and 43 could easily be
misread. Clearly, Polymark has some clear advantages over the
antiquated Tag-o-lectric.
So-called “piece systems”
using button-hole tags are far and away more popular than
either of these systems. In fact, over 75 percent of all
tagging and assembly systems are really all the same system
with just a slight difference. But actually, these two machines
are a piece system, also. The machines merely print the tags as
they go for a basic “piece” system. Their gimmicks
are simply the manner in which the tags are printed and
affixed.
These, like most other systems, also have
a peripheral benefit or two. The chart below shows some other
gimmicks used to sell simple, basic piece systems:
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I know that I have missed some of the tag systems out there, but the foundation for them all is considered here. There is often a gimmick or a key selling point about one particular nuance of the product. Although these sales gimmicks often accomplish what they are supposed to accomplish — make sales — in my view, these individual selling points mean very little when viewing the big picture. I think that you’ll soon agree.
We don’t often think about each of
the individual attributes of a particular system, but I think
that it is important to do so. I’ll try to make it fun,
but before I go on, let me remind you of something regarding
mark-in systems in general.
They all work — very well, in fact
— in theory. And in practice, they work better than 99.9
percent of the time. Probably, nay surely, whatever system that
you use is better than 99.9 percent accurate. The problem, of
course, is that 99.9 percent is very poor in this business.
Frankly, if your assembly system were only 99.9 percent
accurate in your plant and you do the fairly typical 2,000
pieces of drycleaning and the 2,000 shirts (4,000 pieces total
per week), you would be losing 16 pieces per month! 99.9
percent sure sounds poor when viewed like that doesn’t
it?
The more nines that we have to the right
of the decimal point, the better we are at our jobs. I once
heard that if 99.9 percent were good enough, there would be two
unsafe landings at Chicago’s O’Hare airport every
day. Hmmm. As I type this, I am in a 757 on my way to
O’Hare (no kidding). I sure hope that the pilot’s
record is far closer to 100 percent than a mere 99.9 percent.
During the last few months, I have
discussed the cost of allowing your employees to run your
plant. I have also talked about the cost of miscalculating PPOH
(pieces per operator hour). These two examples have a high cost
because we think that we are OK and, therefore, are not
motivated to make any changes.
Our miscalculations add far more to our
cost per shirt than simply paying too much for poly or hangers
or soap. The same holds true for evaluating your tagging and
assembly system. If you do the math and arrive at a number that
sounds palatable, no matter how misleading, suggestive or ill
begotten, then you will accept it as within the goal posts and
do nothing.
Surely, if you calculate anything and the
result is 99.9 percent of something, you will usually conclude
that all is well. Not so when evaluating your tagging and
assembly systems and the results that they yield.
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By carefully reviewing the chart above, you can see how I have objectively rated each of the tag systems in the areas that I consider critical. Still a key element is absent. I’ll get to that in a moment.
Surely, there are systems which I failed
to mention. There are several other variations of these same
systems. The fact is that there are three basic ways in which
to assembly garments: “matching games,”
“sequential number systems” or
“electronic-robotic type.”
I want you to pay special attention to the
words that I used in the last sentence. Specifically,
“ways to assemble garments.” There are a multitude
of ways to mark in, but only three ways to assemble. (One of
the ways hardly counts because of its scarcity. In fact,
let’s ignore the electronic-robotic-mechanical option for
a while. We will consider it later.)
The missing element in the chart is the
ease, or complexity, of assembly.
In evaluating ease of assembly, you must
consider manpower also. If a particular system is
“mistake-proof,” but it requires three people to
make it so, then how does this compare to a system that
isn’t so mistake proof but requires only one person?
Arguably, the former is better, but at
three times the labor cost, there must be a better way.
Conversely, if two systems are compared and the labor necessary
is equal, then other yardsticks are used to compare, accuracy
being only one.
When I was a teenager, my local radio
station used to run a program from time to time called the
Beatles-Stones spin-off. One song from the Beatles would go
head-to-head against a Rolling Stones tune. Listeners would
call in and vote for their favorite among these two tunes, one
always trying to dethrone the other. Next month, we are going
to have a tagging and assembly system “bake-off.”
This should be a lot of fun. Stay-tuned.
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@attbi.com
and he has a web sites located
at: www.tailwindshirts.com and www.dondesrosiers.com
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