No production meetings/planning tools

[danskitt]

Hi,

I have just started a new job as a production manager for a large digital print franchise. They don't have production meetings and there is no form of planning tools like a production board. I have laid out a plan to the boss to introduce a morning production meeting including the printer, finishing charge hand and 4 x sales staff but got a negative response about how they don't work and are a waste of time and every positive reason I put forward like helps with workflow planning, stock ordering, man cover planning, ability for the sales team to give more accurate lead time etc didn't seem a good enough reason to have them. I also suggested we use the trello board which I got from on here as a way to plan and manage the workflow but again got a negative response as it would be too hard for the sales staff to create a trello card and move it to the next process.

Is it me or is this crazy? I would be really interested to find out how many of you guys work without production meetings or production boards.

 

[Keith]

It's not you and it's not necessarily crazy but could drive you nuts. I do know of some non-print companies that do not have an organized system nor do they have meetings and it drives some employees crazy. I have one employee and we have 'production meetings'. We don't sit down at a big round table and look at pie charts and graphs, wherever we happen to be standing we'll talk about a few important/hot jobs that may not have been updated in Trello yet.

I must sympathize with your employer because I do hate 'meetings'. They easily get out of control by going off topic and delving into small talk which of course is unproductive. I prefer to not use the word 'meeting' and just simply call it what it is - communication. They may not realize it but they are having excessive amounts of 'meetings' throughout the day as they talk to each other trying to figure out where a job is at in production.

Just keep yourself organized and avoid the dirty 'M' word (meeting) and eventual (hopefully) your good habits will be noticed. If not, you'll be driven crazy.

 

[MailGuru]

I've worked for very large companies, and, very small companies, and have run the gambit from being a "professional meeting attender" where I was basically in meetings all day long, simply running from one meeting to the next, to no meetings at all.

Our shop is all digital (color & b&w) with a data processing department, programming, pre-press, laser print, bindery and, a hand-fulfillment department averaging about 30 - 50 employees and around 30 - 50 orders per day. Our production schedule is not trello, simply an excel spreadsheet that one of the account managers keep up with on a daily basis. I do not have daily production meetings, as, I feel, in our particular scenario, it would be over-kill.

We meet twice a week (Mondays & Wednesdays at 9:00 am) with my core staff (Department Managers and Account Managers). Less than 10 people. Sales people are not included in this meeting, because, they should be out selling. Sometimes, the meeting only takes 15-20 minutes, sometimes longer. Like Keith said, it is more of a "time to communicate" rather than a "meeting".

The format is a "round-robin" format where everyone at the table has a turn to talk about their jobs on the excel spread-sheet production schedule, what jobs they have coming up that are not on the schedule yet, what personnel are out in their departments (dr's appts, vacation, sick, etc.), and, how that's being covered, any overtime or staggered personnel shifts needed to meet deadlines, what equipment is down and when it is scheduled to be serviced, and, most importantly, what they need from each other to complete their tasks:

Examples:

Pre-Press to DP: "I need a test file with all the variables for the new blah-blah booklet so we can print a proof and get that approved before the go-live date of next Monday."

Pre-Press to Account Executive: "Jackie is working on the new post card proof for so-and-so, you should have that before noon. We are still waiting on the art for that hot-rush job you want out on Friday. Just remind the client, it we don't have it by end-of-business today, chances of having it in the mail by Friday are pretty slim. We'll do what we can, but, based on our current departmental workload, it doesn't look good."

Bindery to Admin: "We're down to 120,000 tabs. According to the schedule, we have a 100,000-piece ink-jet/2-tab project for next week. we need to order more tabs. booklet-maker #2 is down, and, service has been called. We have more mail going today than will fit on one truck, so, we will need to schedule two trips to the post office, instead of the usual 1 afternoon trip".

Laser to Admin: Jack is out Thursday & Friday of this week, we will need to either pull someone from one of the other departments to run lasers, or, schedule overtime to keep the lasers running. We have 2 printers down and service calls have been placed.

Data Processing to Account Executive: I will have the audit reports for "----" ready for you by 2:00 this afternoon. We are still waiting on data for job # 55555. Do you have an ETA of when we will be receiving that?

etc.

We keep it light-hearted, and, it's basically more of a time for my core staff to get together and go over production, business concerns, any obstacles, etc.

I hope this helps. But, always remember, the boss-is-the-boss. If he said "no-meetings", then it's up to you to figure out how to get your people to "communicate with one-another" without meetings. Hey, if middle-management was simple, anybody could do it (most can't).

Best

-MailGuru

 

[davarino]

Depends on the size of your shop and the complexity of the mix, as the other contributors have said.

I view meetings as usually a waste of the time and talents of at least 3 people. As social beings, we immediately move into political mode with things... not informational mode.

You may wish to implement a self-imposed one-on-one wandering through the plant as your way of getting people to see that they need to pass more information to each other... after all, that's the primary, measurably productive, purpose of meetings.

You don't need meetings as much as you need the best communication.

Certainly, formally instituted meetings should have a one-purpose agenda, and a ground rule of 5-minutes maximum meeting time should be followed unless absolutely necessary.

Meetings should be viewed the same as adjustment of inking on a press during a run or re-setting register on a folder: possibly useful, but utterly destructive when engaged in from moment to moment because they can easily cause "noise"-filled communication.

 

[JimBob53]

I work for a company that has no meetings. We do have a job list that's updated daily. A copy is given to every designer and then one copy to each pressman and one to bindery. It works well, for the most part. As long as the person doing the list keeps on his toes and keeps the list up-to-date all goes well.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

I work for a company that has no meetings. We do have a job list that's updated daily. A copy is given to every designer and then one copy to each pressman and one to bindery. It works well, for the most part. As long as the person doing the list keeps on his toes and keeps the list up-to-date all goes well.

Lists are a good way to avoid meetings! If the list is created from an MIS/ERP system, then this is all automatic without the need for a person to keep anything up to date.


Stephen Marsh

 

[dabob]

We are a smallish commercial printer and started having prod. meetings every morning with the heads of the depts, and sales about 10 years ago - we wrote our own production scheduler/tracker and found that getting together every morning at 7:00am for 15 minutes a great way to make sure that we are all on the same page each day, it also allows us to warn anyone necessary about upcoming panic jobs that might be on the horizon -

we have found that 15 minutes in the morning isn't a waste of time . . . .

 

[danskitt]

Thanks everyone for you replies.

I guess the use of the word meeting is a bit strong I believe we need a quick informal gathering to give each member a chance to let the others know about particular jobs that have special circumstances i.e. lead times, special stock orders etc...

I think as they haven't been doing the kind of thing before I will need to introduce these plans bit by bit to let them get comfortable with the ideas

 

[MailGuru]

Lists are a good way to avoid meetings! If the list is created from an MIS/ERP system, then this is all automatic without the need for a person to keep anything up to date.


Stephen Marsh

Lists are great. But, a few minutes in the morning, face-to-face, with your business "family" (let's face it, where you work is like a family, over the course of your lifetime, you will spend more hours with your co-workers, than you will with your family at home), even if only twice a week instead of daily, is, IMHO, crucial to not only an efficient enterprise, but also morale. Change it up, supply coffee and donuts, or juice and fruit.

Best

-MailGuru

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Lists are great. But, a few minutes in the morning, face-to-face, with your business "family" (let's face it, where you work is like a family, over the course of your lifetime, you will spend more hours with your co-workers, than you will with your family at home), even if only twice a week instead of daily, is, IMHO, crucial to not only an efficient enterprise, but also morale. Change it up, supply coffee and donuts, or juice and fruit.

Best

-MailGuru

Agreed, lists are good but they only go so far. A list may show that there are 10 jobs due out today or tomorrow by end of day. But which of those 10 jobs should be run first, second etc? This is where planning/scheduling based on a production manager’s input is vital (or manual flagging of the list comes into play). The critical role that the MIS brings in is that most if not all of this can be automated. Then there is the all important coffee and donuts that you mention!


Stephen Marsh

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Attached is an image of a custom report that I created in the Accura MIS to help pre-plan jobs to be placed in the scheduling module.

I have only shown 2 jobs for clarity with two separate report list prints combined into one image. The upper report lists all jobs required by the due date. The lower report has been filtered to show work that has been earmarked for a specific machine.

The list is filtered by required by date. I have broken the job’s estimated labour time up by department (studio, print, finishing), so that on a job by job basis the production manager can see how long each job is estimated to take by department, as well as the grand total time of all jobs by department for this due by date. The time is decimal, so 0.25 is 15 minutes.


Stephen Marsh