What is your workflow

[Chriswagner92]

Good Morning sign people

I was laminating some prints this morning, and had the thought "What if i only print on Mondays and Tuesdays, laminate and cut on wednesday, and keep Thursday and Friday open for installs." Right now I print as much as i can on a media and switch it if i need to, so I could be doing 2 jobs on 30" roll, 4 on a 54" roll and then have to switch back to the 30" to finish something later in the day, so there is a lot of loading and unloading of the media. I can see that if I switch to scheduled printing my turnaround time will go up, and will probably leave me with more "leisure" time. It may also help to note that i use an sp540v.

What do you guys do?

 

[JTBoh]

Buy a latex printer. No outgassing. We print and lam most wraps same day, with vehicle in house.
Eat the drop, or nest jobs as much as possible. Charge by linear foot.
There will always be overruns on install days, due to f-ups, weather, etc. - this will delay your installs by a week and will likely have a snowball effect.
Workflow works in a big shop, but without dedicated installation/production people, hard to do it.

JMHO.

 

[Chriswagner92]

Buy a latex printer. No outgassing. We print and lam most wraps same day, with vehicle in house.
Eat the drop, or nest jobs as much as possible. Charge by linear foot.
There will always be overruns on install days, due to f-ups, weather, etc. - this will delay your installs by a week and will likely have a snowball effect.
Workflow works in a big shop, but without dedicated installation/production people, hard to do it.

JMHO.

I'm looking at the hp 315. We don't really do any wraps, so we don't need a 64" printer... and i just got a 54" RS laminator.

 

[T_K]

I do over 70% of my printing/cutting on one material, but have some days/weeks where I'm doing frequent changes between printable material and cut-only material. I try to do all my printing in the morning and then use the afternoon for cutting. This typically works well. Next morning, I come in and my prints are ready to laminate while the printer is running. Then in the afternoon, I get all the cutting/finish-out done.

 

[bannertime]

I take orders in during the day and start production at night. I do some same-day orders during the day and finish small projects in between customers and calls. I also hadn't had more than 3 days off at a time in about 3 years (bank holiday + weekend) and "work" 10-10. It's not a healthy life style. The plus side is when a customer comes in the next day and says "I came by here yesterday at like 6:30pm and no one was here. I really needed to pick that order up." Uh, I have cameras on a screen next to my desk and I see every time a vehicle pulls into the lot and if someone is at the door, you were not there.

If I cared enough to change I'd do something like SAV in the morning, banners in the afternoon while cutting and finishing the SAVs. Finish banners and signs from prior day in the morning while printing the new batch of SAVs. We try to reserve Monday and Friday for installs. Wednesday and Thursday for heat press. All the plastic and metal signs just get done when they can or need to be done.

 

[SlikGRFX]

I print every day. I run all my long prints overnight and keep the day for short runs and odd jobs/reprints. Someone once said to me "if your printer isn't printing, it's costing you money". So keep those printers running. Your printer can print when you are installing or sleeping.

I've toyed with printing every other day, but I think printing every day keeps the printers healthy. If you only print Mon/Tues, your printer will be left standing for 5 days. I'd be concerned about the heads drying up, or having the hassle of multiple cleaning every Monday morning.