Things are not going to go back to the way there were prior to the pandemic. We are in a new reality now and things will continue to change in the coming years.
Do you really think that lower cost workers are coming back?
The labor market has changed and you have to deal with the new reality.
Are you overly dependent on a few employees who have the skills needed to finish garments on your existing equipment? If so, you need to consider updating your equipment to machines that are easier to operate, provide a better quality finish, require few, if any touch ups, and don’t require months or years of experience to operate.
Every time you see a garment coming off a machine that needs to be “touched up” you are wasting money.
When you consider the productivity of a machine you need to think about how many shirts, pants, etc. you are processing “to completion” per employee per hour. Many people have told me over the years that their employee presses “x” number of shirts per hour but they leave out the fact that 90% of them are being “touched up” by other employees at a much lower rate of speed. By upgrading to machines that do a better job of finishing requiring little or no touch up you can actually recover the cost of the equipment in a short period of time.
For example:
Drycleaner “A” has an older hot plate shirt finisher with an older cuff & collar pressing machine. They need to produce 300 shirts in a day.
The main operator can run 50 shirts per hour over the equipment. Due to the nature of the machine having no adjustability for size variations, thickness of material, etc., nearly every shirt requires some type of touch up before it can go out to the customer.
The shirts then need to be moved to another machine where they need to be hand ironed at a much slower pace. The operators doing the touch up need to be highly skilled in order to keep up with the pace of the machines coming at them from the shirt unit and to get to the level of final quality required. At this volume, 2 operators running two touch-up stations will be required.
Including lunch and break times it takes the “shirt operator” 8 hours to get the work done. It takes the other two “touch up” workers the same amount of time to get the work done.
At the end of the day, 300 shirts were finished requiring 24 hours of labor time. An actual production of 12.5 shirts per hour per operator.
Looking at it differently, at a cost of $20.00 per hour per employee it is costing this plant $480.00 (24 hours x $20/hour) to produce 300 shirts. This brings the per shirt cost to $1.60 per shirt!!! ($480.00 / 300)
Let’s now look at how upgrading to a new, current model, high end tensioning shirt finisher with a tensioning cuff & collar press with self-contained vacuum could change things.
The operator can run 50 shirts per hour over the equipment but fewer than 5% of the shirts would require any type of touch up. There is enough time in an 8 hour shift for the same operator to touch up the small number of shirts.
At the end of the day, 300 shirts were finished requiring 8 hours of labor time. An actual production of 37.5 shirt per hour.
Looking at it in terms of cost, at the same $20.00 per hour labor cost only one operator working for 8 hours can finish the work. That’s a total cost of $160.00 or, $160.00/300 shirts which comes to only 53 cents per shirt.
Viewing it from the investment standpoint, purchasing a set of new, updated machines with a purchase cost of $50,000.00 the machines could save you $1.07 per shirt processed. The break-even point would be 46,729 shirts ($50,000 / $1.07). At 300 shirts per day, it would take only 155 days of processing (about 6 months) to save enough in labor costs to pay for the new equipment. Everything after that is clear profit. Not only that but you will have the need for fewer employees, less reliance on so called “skilled employees”, and much more flexibility to handle whatever comes over your counter.
Stuart Ilkowitz
The author is the CEO of Trevil USA. You can contact him at (973) 535-8305.
