Lead times and psychology

Production deadlines often become the cause of conflicts between the customer and the contractor. The customer believes that “all deadlines have been missed,” and the contractor, in turn, convinces that “they did it very quickly and it would be nice to pay extra for the urgency.” As a rule, the printing house client does not have a complete understanding of the features of printing technology and therefore cannot adequately estimate the time required for production. In addition to objective reasons, there are a number of psychological problems.

Firstly, it is human nature to underestimate the difficulties and complexities of others and overestimate their own. This leads to the fact that the customer, preparing material for delivery to the printing house, delays it in every possible way - “the manager still approves”, redoes it many times - “the manager forced it to be remade” or, conversely, does not take the preparation seriously enough - “if something If it’s not right, the printing house will fix it, but I don’t have time to bother with it, I have plenty of other things to do.”

As a result, the order is somehow and belatedly transferred to the printing house. At the same time, the customer is sure that everything done in the best possible way and is sincerely surprised when the circulation is not ready by the promised date. The fact that the order had to be finalized in the printing house, spending significantly more time on it than required according to the standards (for example, due to poor color separation or trapping), the customer, as a rule, does not care. A conflict situation arises. In order to work in a civilized manner, you need to learn mutual understanding.

Secondly, each person has his own temporary concepts, and they are interpreted subconsciously in their favor. If, to For example, a customer asks a printing house to place an order “very quickly,” then most likely he means “tomorrow morning,” and the printing house “by the end of next week.” Moreover, everyone will sincerely believe that this is fast.

Organizational reasons influence the overall order execution time to a greater extent than technological ones. This is explained simply: several orders are processed in parallel in the printing house, which are distributed according to execution priority, taking into account the optimization of equipment loading and the reduction of non-production losses. For example, there are several orders queued for printing. Silver ink was loaded into the printing machine to print Order No. 1. The production manager has two options for further action: print Order No. 1, wash off the silver and fill in ink to print Order No. 2, or see if there is another one among the orders that also uses silver paint - let's call it Order No. 3. By placing Order No. 3 out of turn, the printing house will save at least one wash of the machine, which in terms of time is about half an hour. But even here, problems are possible, for example, it turns out that for Order No. 3 they did not deliver paper, did not make forms, etc. It is necessary to rebuild the technological chain again. Managing production is not easy; For its successful organization, experienced specialists and computerized management systems are involved.