A print shop is a physical process, and every metre a garment travels is money. In a two-press shop the layout decides the throughput ceiling more than the presses do.
Lay it out along the flow
The garment's path is a straight line, so the room should be too:
Blanks in -> Staging -> Press -> Dryer -> QC -> Pack -> Dispatch
No step should hand work backwards. If your QC bench is on the other side of the room from the dryer, every job crosses the floor twice, past every other job in progress, which is how pieces get mixed.
Zones and what they need
| Zone | Needs | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Blanks in | Door access, space to open and count cartons | Counting in a gangway |
| Staging | A pallet or trolley per live job, labelled | No dedicated space at all |
| Press | Clear working radius, ink and tools within reach | Ink stored across the room |
| Screen room | Adjacent to presses, dark, wet-safe | Reclaim next to the press |
| Dryer | Ventilation, reachable from both presses | One dryer, one press's side |
| QC and pack | Good light, bench height, bin for seconds | Poor lighting |
| Dispatch | Carrier access, space to stage boxes | Boxes in the pack area |
Good light at QC is not a detail. Most missed faults are missed because nobody could see them.
Give every job a physical home
One trolley, pallet or shelf per live job, labelled with the order number. Nothing on the floor, nothing in an unlabelled pile.
This single change usually does more for a shop's error rate than any equipment purchase. Mixed jobs, lost pieces and printing the wrong garment all come from work in progress with no address.
Keep wet away from screens
Reclaim, washout and coating generate humidity and dust. Both are enemies of exposure quality and of ink. Put them at the far end from the presses, with their own ventilation, and keep the coating and drying cabinet somewhere genuinely dust-free.
Cap work in progress deliberately
If you only have space for six live jobs at the staging area, that is your work-in-progress limit, and it is a useful one. A shop that starts twelve jobs to look busy finishes them slower than a shop that starts six and completes them. The physical constraint enforces the discipline for you.
Put the board where the work is
The layout's job is to make the next action obvious without anyone asking. A screen on the wall showing what is due, what is on the press and what is waiting on QC does the same job for time that the layout does for space. See the production board on a shop TV for what to display and where to mount it.
Printer's Friend gives each station its own filtered view, so the packer's screen shows QC and pack and nothing else, matching the physical zone they stand in. For the process the layout is serving, see the nine stages.