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Everyday, most of us choose the most important thing to work on. The employees in the carpeted area of your print business are making these decisions everyday. Do you know what they are prioritizing? Do you know how they are spending their time? You should measure time just like you measure revenues, profits, and costs.
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About Jennifer Matt
Jennifer Matt is the managing editor of WhatTheyThink’s Print Software section as well as President of Web2Print Experts, Inc. a technology-independent print software consulting firm helping printers with web-to-print and print MIS solutions.
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Discussion
By Chris Lynn on Jun 05, 2019
While it's hard to argue with the notion that getting more data helps inform good management decisions, the main benefit of finding out how time is spent in Overhead Country is that it can help to identify constraints. Many businesses focus on keeping the presses fully utilized, but if the constraint to greater throughput is in billing or customer support, the focus is on the wrong thing.
Bottlenecks in SG&A departments are harder to spot than on the shop floor, but if time tracking identifies that Alice is 60% utilized, whereas Bob is 98% utilized, don't criticize Alice - focus on improving the workflow around Bob.
I recently wrote about this here: https://www.piworld.com/article/how-to-think-about-digital-printer-investments/