How many mug presses can 1 person opperate?

[Andrew]

You learn what to look for on certain designs and print coverage and get used to mass production. I would probably go as far to say quality control will be better. 2, 3 or 4 people running a few sets of presses means the same person will spend an hour purely working on the mugs going in and out of the presses. No distractions on cutting paper or taping etc. We always have a team of atleast two so 10 heads running or 15 for 3 etc. All tried and tested and running day in day out. Other people work on flat presses so basically all will have encountered many problems on their own process to understand what to look for. Getting the process running smoothly is easy enough as the fine tuning has taken place and only small adjustments required.

It is horses for courses scenario as not many will ever need to print bulk. If the mugs going in and out of the presses is all you have to focus on then it becomes second nature.

[phoenixalpha]

for me? before and after making the mug.

[Andrew]

that's impressive ... how many presses do you run per person, what's your process, is this time include unboxing and reboxing?

When we first of all worked on what quantities were realistic we had just one person running four heads. This was about 5 years ago as now we havemore than one person at a time running things which helps further. The testing was with one person cutting prints, taping mugs, unpacking and packing in bulk. No base stickers etc. Everything is set up to help speed the process. The way the prints come out so we can cut the paper on multiple sheets at a time. 3 cuts on A4 and 15 mugs are ready to wrap. Spend a minute on cutting and you have enough for an hour so that job is complete. Once sheets are cut it is easy to tape 10 mugs in a couple of minutes. Unpacking a box of mugs is a couple of minutes and the box is placed then ready for packing. Everything is basically at hand to keep up momentum.

If every design was different qc would take longer I agree. Not sure what targets would be hit then.

We have timings set for all products and it goes from coasters being the quickest to mass produce and things like flip flops the slowest. Fine tuning this way is how we can work on low margins.

[pisquee]

have you been tempted to go then oven route instead of lots of presses?

[Andrew]

We have some ovens in now and the wraps. I have been tempted to go conveyor but we still deliberate on the higher temp scenario for screen printing. Overall, presses are cheaper to run so haven't rushed into anything. We just get more presses to up production up until now. 6 people on 30 heads gets a fair few mugs out in a day.

[Justin]

I've been deliberating the whole ovens vs press situation and decided that I'll probably run with 3 x 4 head presses. Factoring in time to wrap transfers and apply the wrap itself I just don't think it's worth the massive oven outlay.

[Andrew]

Ovens have started to become more important so we start offering the other styles...... various China/ Latte/Steins etc. Still not 100% on which way to go for the standard size. Don't want to be changing blankets and pressures all the time on presses though.