Recently, I ended more than two years on the other side of the deadline fence as art director of a small biweekly newspaper. The usual routine was that nothing got to the editor on time, the salespeople rarely sold an ad before their deadline, the editor couldn't give me edited copy on time, and photos were never ordered until after they were already supposed to be in my hands. Every second week I worked a last-minute miracle, and we went to press on time--or nearly on time.
In that business and probably in most others, the problem was a tendency to notice that nothing really bad happened by ignoring the deadline, so everyone concerned adopted the mind-set that the real deadline was several days after the stated deadline. In the case of the newspaper, it was a startup venture, and they needed the extra money they got from accepting last-minute ads far more than absolute deadlines. And in the case of this column, the editors and I have comfortably fallen into a schedule that is roughly ten days behind the official one.
Is not adhering to deadlines a bad thing? I have seen so many processes in which everything went down to the wire every time without negative effects that I started to believe that flexible deadlines were acceptable if not optimal.
However, I once spent several months in a circuit-board plant that operated on a totally ludicrous deadline schedule. Management took monthly revenue figures extremely seriously and would go to any length to "make the numbers." If a month ended on a weekend, arrangements were made with UPS to have a trailer in our parking lot so that we could "ship" goods on Saturday and Sunday. In one particularly bad month, a decision was made that I considered to be outright fraud: three pallets of circuit boards were packaged and shipped with the last operation not completed so that the boards could be counted in the month's revenue figures. Naturally, they were promptly shipped back and finished--a pointless expense and a drag on the following month's productivity. I think it is a real cause for concern when a scheduling practice leads to this kind of behavior on the part of normally honest and ethical managers.
This cycle was obviously destructive. The first week of each month was very laid back; since most of us were burned out from the previous month-end rush, we only ran small jobs, reclaimed all the screens, and cleaned the shop. The middle of every month was marked by smooth and efficient production with very few quality problems. Then came the last week of the month, which was a frenzied mess, with everybody working at least 50% overtime whether they wanted the money or not. Reliability and customer relationships suffered.
Another example of the problems that come from not meeting deadlines is the column you're reading now. An eye infection prevented me from doing any research or writing during the period that I would normally have prepared the column--the last week or two before it was actually due. I was as healthy as ever earlier in the month, when I should have written it, but I was in the habit of putting it off. In this case, my routine backfired since I pushed the column back into a time when I was incapable of getting the work done. Imagine my panic when I realized that I had a column to create and was unable to focus on my computer screen!
In all too many screen-printing shops, both those I have managed and those I have consulted, this tendency occasionally results in disasters. The most obvious failure is the job that gets pushed back to Saturday, and only then, when suppliers are closed, does the firm discover that one ink color is absent from the inkroom shelves. Or perhaps they realize that one film positive needs to be recreated, and somebody else put off ordering film until Monday.
Another potential risk is that after pushing too much work back against the deadline, another customer will call with a juicy rush job that you have to pass up. Most of the time, we learn to push things back just as far as we can without hurting ourselves or our clients. But sometimes, we end up losing to our competitors in these situations.
Customers aren't stupid, particularly those who have chosen to work with us in the first place. They notice our patterns of delivery, and their expectations are formed by watching how we handle our current work. Our performance influences whether they send us more. If, over time, we consistently seem to go right down to the wire with all of their jobs, customers will doubt our ability to handle even more work without actually starting to miss real deadlines.
If in a rush for revenue, we deliver a few jobs well ahead of schedule while other jobs are finished at the last minute, we send a clear message that we really aren't in control of our processes at all. This doesn't help the clients sleep well and will eventually drive them to our competitors.
On the other hand, consistently delivering early can also cause customer expectations to change, which may result in deadlines that we can't meet. However, there is little or no danger involved in having a job ready to deliver several days before it actually needs to ship.
Screen Printing magazine has consistently run articles stressing the importance of process control. If you aren't in control of your processes, you will spend too much time in rework. By moving all of our work closer to the front of the month, we can go a long way towards eliminating deadline nightmares.
Over the years, I have frequently mentioned the time savings possible with computers. Although I can't offer a computer solution to eliminating deadlines and bottlenecks, I have to beg you to not let the time savings of computer-generated artwork compound the existing problems of meeting production commitments. Maybe this is a process that can be controlled, and it almost certainly is in some environments, but for now I fear it is a matter of attitude and motivation. As my wife remarked while watching me thrashing around this column, "When all is said and done, if not for the last minute, much would be said and nothing done."