The following guest article is by Marshall Atkinson, a 20-year veteran in the decorated apparel industry, Chief Operating Officer of industry leader Visual Impressions out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, long-time user of OnSite, and owner of Atkinson Consulting LLC. Read his popular decorated apparel business blog at atkinsontshirt.
Whether you are new to Shopworks OnSite or a grizzled old veteran one thing that can pep up your shop efficiency is the effective use of Notes in the OnSite order system. Why should Notes matter so much? Is this you? “They’re a pain to enter and just take too much time. I have phone calls to make! I can just print out the customer’s e-mails and staple them to the work order. That should do it.”
Think about that for a second. If you’ve ever had to explain “what’s that mean?” to someone in your shop because they don’t know what to do next I have an answer for you. It means you didn’t enter the order correctly. You have to make it easy for everyone to do the right thing. The better the Notes in the OnSite system, the easier it is for your staff to comprehend the next step for them to complete the order.
One of the great functional features in OnSite is that each department has their own section in the system to fully enter any sort of instructions that can benefit the user in that department. Sadly, a lot of these areas are left blank. To work more effectively, try getting your staff to enter more Notes into the system about an order and train your staff to read the notes first when they encounter something that needs clarification. If they are used to running up front to help solve the puzzle this is a hard habit to break.
For example, let’s say the inventory for your order hasn’t arrived yet and the job is due to print tomorrow. When will the goods arrive? If your customer service rep or purchasing person entered the tracking number for the shipment in Notes to Receiving anybody in the building can click the UPS tracking hyperlink and know that the goods will not arrive until two days from now. Looks like we’ll need to move that date out… If you have your staff trained to look into the Notes for Receiving for information like this, your team can make better decisions with fewer interruptions and be able to move quicker throughout their day. There’s less panic.
So what are the best practices for using Notes in Shopworks? Here are some great tips:
To really make the Notes platform work, it’s important that your team handle them in a standardized way. If you aren’t utilizing this feature, get your staff together and have a brief meeting about it. Have each department discuss what they would like to see in the Notes area, the verbiage that should be used, and how or when the Notes should be written. It’s important that everyone agree on the procedure for your shop, and then make it the standard. Hold your employees accountable for writing the Notes in a certain way after that. It doesn’t work if everyone does it their own unique way, or if one person just always “forgets” to do it. on’t give people a pass; instead insist that this is part of doing their job just like any other task. Initially it may feel like you are herding cats, but eventually it will become the norm and you’ll look back and wonder why you didn’t implement using more Notes in the system sooner. Keep at it!