First, the importance of correct estimation of production time

Each entrepreneur has high expectations of success in business. This requires a clear understanding of what he wants and communicates ideas with employees so that each employee has a basic goal and based on this. The work and the work of the entire unit make a reasonable assessment.

In the printing of the garment printing industry or similar products, the determination of production time is very important. First of all, you should be able to clearly estimate the time needed to produce each type of job. When the customer asks for the completion time, you can basically say the delivery date and be responsible for your own commitment. Otherwise, you will face losing customers. The danger of trust.

Second, estimates of production time can generate profits. There are many factors that affect the profitability of operations. Semi-finished products, consumables, labor, rents, utilities, taxes, etc. to be printed, and the time spent on production is also a factor that affects profitability. Therefore, if you can accurately estimate the production time, you can better predict the profit of an operation and can predict whether an operation is worth doing.

Evaluating an employee's work efficiency or overall work efficiency in a shop is the third reason to estimate production time. Experience has shown that work must be done only when time permits. So if employees know what your requirements for them are, they will complete the work within the planned time. A valuable employee is someone who tries to get the job done in the least amount of time. Pre-estimating production time can inspire them.

Workshop setups, equipment and production processes can create an environment conducive to production or hinder production, while also greatly reducing production time.

You can update equipment or supplies to increase productivity, so you will find that after switching to some flexible wooden frames, the printing time is shortened, which means that the efficiency is improved.

The screen printing process has thousands of variables to handle. For each device, the importance of these variables is also different, even from one printing process to another. This is the reason why you need to estimate production time rather than say exactly how much time a particular job spends. What you want is an approximate number.

Using some simple charts, basic math tools, and collected data, you can create accurate production time estimates. You can use this information to schedule, estimate profits, evaluate employee productivity, and increase business productivity. A good estimation formula will help you to have a clear understanding of all costs and profits, and it will help you to know how much time is spent in each process.

The following table to analyze:
Table 1: Standard production time (in minutes) for manual printing
Color number 1 color 2 color 3 color 4 color 5 color 6 color production time/piece (clothing) 0.5 0.55 0.60 0.67 0.75 0.86
Setup and interruption time 12 24 36 48 60 72
The values ​​shown in the chart are the actual calculated averages. Note: This is just an example. The value is not necessarily suitable for your production conditions. Different production processes, equipment, etc. will have different values.

Table 2: Standard time for automatic printing (in minutes)
Color number 1 color 2 color 3 color 4 color 5 color 6 color production time/piece (clothing) 0.15 0.15 0.15 0.15 0.15 0.15
Setup and interruption time 12 25 40 54 70 87

With automatic printing, the calculation of production time is relatively simple.

Before we collect production data from the workshop, let us test some samples, which are obtained from many years of practice. We will use these sample data to explain how to obtain average productivity data.

remember! The numbers in Tables 1 and 2 are just a guide, and actual data from your production floor may differ significantly from these data. But this does not mean that one of us is wrong. It only means that there is no difference between standard and non-standard.

We begin with manual printing (Table 1). There are two rows of data in Table 1, the upper row of data represents the production time from one color to six colors, and the second row represents the total time of setup and interruption. The so-called "set" time refers to the time from the start of preparation of each job to the first screen version of the machine and the first acceptable product. remember! Although we are talking about actual production time, not including the time spent on some additional tasks, such as ink transfer, handling of squeegees, etc., it is assumed here that the tools and supplies are ready when the setup is started.

For the same reason, "interruption" refers to the time between the completion of the previous job and the start of the next job. Cleaning and regeneration are not interrupted. We will later explain the settings and the time of interruption separately, but at the beginning of the calculation, they are integrated into one row of the estimation table.

Now we calculate the job production time. Suppose the job is 4-color 96 pieces, hand-printed. From the table, the estimated time for printing a four-color garment is 0.67 minutes, so theoretically, this task takes 64.32 minutes to complete:

96 pieces x 0.67 minutes = 64.32 minutes We can set this time to approximately 64 minutes, and then add the setting/interruption time:
64 minutes production time + 48 minutes setting/interruption time = 12 minutes

Calculating by automatic printing is relatively simple, because the printing speed is the same regardless of whether 1 or 5 colors are printed (Table 2). In fact, for five-color printing, there are five or more failures to clear the fiber glitch, five times the possibility of scratching the screen, or more. But for the estimated production time, the main reason is setting/interrupting time instead of production time