Very bad credit personal signature loan

Byline: Melanie Coakley

If you have ever stopped at the end of the day, looked around and asked yourself "What did I get accomplished today?" then you may need to rethink your shop layout. Now, I am not as bad as the ladies who are constantly moving their living room furniture around, but I do know when I should change my shop around for maximum efficiency. Let's look at how we should reinvent our layout.

Where To Start?

Shop size is a big determining factor when deciding which layout plan is most efficient for you. The structural components of the building must also be taken into consideration. The best suggestion for getting started with floor planning is to buy a pad of graph paper. I prefer the large size (11 inches by 17 inches). Each grid square on the graph paper will equal 1 foot. By doing this you will be able to measure what you are putting in your shop and how much space you will need. Begin by sketching in your existing floor plan, so you can get an overview of what is and is not working. Make sure to sketch in where the doors and windows are first. Put in any structural beams, bathrooms, storage rooms, etc. Once you have this sketched out, you can begin to pencil in the layout. Remember, you have a whole pad of paper, so let your pencil sketch before you wear out your back moving things around.

Your second draft can be your dream layout. Keep in mind what you have to work with. We are not remodeling and moving support beams and bathrooms; we are merely trying to accommodate an efficient work area so that work flows in, through and out as smoothly as possible.

Setting Up A Showroom

Because it is your company's first impression on a customer, it's important that your showroom be as neat and presentable as possible. Look at what you have now. Is it cluttered with boxes, sample items lying around in a pile? Or do you have items hung by degrees of quality and price? In today's fast-paced business world, you do not have a lot of time with a customer. They are in a hurry to go pick up children, move on to another project, or in most cases, they have waited until the last minute to purchase the garment for an upcoming trade show. Having an organized showroom will help you sell easier and faster. The customer will appreciate a professional approach and feel more comfortable trusting you with their work.

Have sample books of your work handy for those first-time customers. Have your price list handy and know your products. The best showroom in the world means little if you do not know the products you are selling. Change your showroom around to reflect seasons and holidays. This lets your customers know you have new products and that you stay in step with the current trends in wearables.

Sales Staff Space

You should consider having an area for outside sales personnel to call their base. This also gives you an easy way to keep them informed, a computer to work from and phone/voice mail options. Keeping your staff in touch is important. If they are on the road, they need to be able to retrieve voice mails. Consider cell phones as well. Customers like to know they can get in touch with their rep when needed. Keep their offices close to the showroom for easy access to samples and to make it convenient for vendors to stop by and show their products.

You may consider keeping accounting close to your reps so that they establish a good understanding about what goes on once the goods are sold. Keeping the salespeople up-to-date about who is current and who needs to be collected from helps the salesperson know what to prepare for on that next sales call, or who they need to speak to. This can help your cash flow considerably. You can see now that your layout should be conducive for business as well as production.

The Digitizing Workspace

If you have in-house digitizing, you have several things to consider. Keep in mind that digitizing is very focused work and is the foundation for your embroidery. Putting a digitizer in the middle of the production area can be very chaotic and frustrating for the digitizer. Make sure they have a space of their own. Preferably, an office with walls and a door. There will be designs they will be working on that will require them to be undisturbed. The digitizer is a key position, and if they are put in a very accessible area, they will have a tough time with interruptions. They should be accessible to production and sales, but have a way to shut themselves off, when needed.

Receiving Area

It is important to include a receiving area in your layout. This area is where you will check in the goods, prep them for production and check to be sure you have received what you ordered. This process should be done to ensure that your customer gets what he wanted and to make sure that your production is not interrupted.

If your vendor has sent wrong sizes or colors, having a receiving checkpoint allows you time to contact him before they are sent to the machines. If goods come in three or four days before they are to run, you don't want to lose those days only to find out when you go to run them, they are the wrong size and color. Mistakes like this need to be discovered as soon as possible so you have the time to correct them. Too many embroiderers discover the problem at the machines, then have to pull off the order to figure out what to do.

Once the goods are received, you should stage/prep them. Again, it is important to have the goods ready to run. Do not eat up your machine time by having to stand there and pull out straight pins, cardboard and tissue paper. If the items come in bagged, unbagging them at the machine wastes production time.

Production Area

The staging area should lead right to the production area. Operators should be able to move from one order to the next without having to ask questions about what is next, or if something is ready to run. I prefer to have a folder that includes the order, disk, and printout with the boxes so an operator can pick it up and run it. Also, you need to make sure the receiving person labels the boxes "one of five," "two of five," etc. This way the operator knows exactly what it is they are running and how many boxes there are. I find that a little preparation work goes a long way in eliminating mistakes and costly production time. After all, once the goods are embroidered, it's a little late to think of such things. I can promise you that your shop is the greatest classroom for learning. Once something goes wrong, you will be asking yourself, how could I have avoided this and how can I keep it from happening in the future? Production should be laid out so that you can easily get the order run. If the goods have been processed, then production should consist of tying on thread, loading the design, framing the garments, inspecting and packing for shipment.

Shipping

Once the goods have been produced and packed, you can have two designated locations for them to go to. The first being an area for those customers who will be picking up their orders, and another for goods that are being shipped.

My shop has two back entrances, so I prefer to keep the receiving area at one door and shipping at the other. This eliminates the potential for mixing up the boxes. You want to avoid having a box that was to be shipped sitting among the boxes that just came in for the day.

Accounting

Once the goods have been processed, the next step is invoicing. If you have been wise in taking a deposit, then it is still important to collect the balance due. If you are offering terms, then the faster you can get the goods in and turn them around, the better off your cash flow will be. Turning in the order to be invoiced is essential to payment. Some embroidery shops invoice at the time the goods are ordered, others wait until after the work is completed. This is a matter of personal preference. Make smart moves, and you will keep your business running with ease. If you become a bank instead of an embroiderer and choose to let others work off of your money, it will make for a lot of stress. Since the 9/11 incident, it is interesting how business has changed and more and more companies are clamping down on collections and not extending credit. Vendors are now more conscious about their cash flow as well. So, the key here is to ask for deposits and keep your business as solvent as possible. If you want to become a bank, then you need to charge for the money you loan out to customers.