Increasing Your Production Output I Embroidery Project

No matter how large or how small your shop is, proper production planning is a must! Your goal is to keep the machine running as many minutes out of each hour as possible. Since your income is a result of your production, you only make money when the machine is sewing. And if you can maximize the output of your machine(s) then you can increase your profits as well.

For example, if you routinely have 30 minutes of actual run time per hour at an average speed of 800spm, that means 24000 stitches her hour. If your operational cost is $30.00 per hour, then you have a minimum sewing cost of $1.25 per 1000 stitches. However, if you could increase your output to 45 minutes of sewing per hour, then your stitch cost drops to $0.83 per 1000 stitches. The result is that you pocket more money or charge a more competitive price. Either way, you come out ahead.

The most effective method for getting more out of your machine(s) is proper production planning. Production planning means creating a process for scheduling work that utilizes your equipment efficiently such that downtime is kept to a minimum.

It’s a common misconception that work orders must be processed in the order in which they are received and one job must be completely finished before starting the next one. Certainly there are situations where this is true, (such as a rush order) but for the most part your work should be scheduled by sewing characteristics, in order to maximize machine production time. This ensures that job setup time is kept to an absolute minimum. Job setup is typically the most costly part of the production process, since the machine remains idle for an extended time while it is readied for the next order.

To minimize such downtime, analyze each job and then group it with other jobs that have similar characteristics. For example, run all of your cap orders in sequence, even if some work-orders have a mixture of caps and shirts. After all the caps are completed, convert the machine to sew shirts, then do all of the same type of shirts together, one after the other. After you have completed all of the sewing of the individual components, then you can group them back together by work order, pack and ship.

Though it might seem awkward at first, focusing on maximizing output, rather than processing each order individually, will ensure that you are operating at the highest level of efficiency.