Production Scheduling: Book More Jobs Without Overloading Staff

You're sitting in your office on a Tuesday afternoon when three rush orders land in your inbox simultaneously. Your single DTG machine is booked solid. Your embroidery operator just called in sick. And your best screen printer is already working overtime.

Sound familiar?

This is the reality for most decorated apparel shop owners: the conflict between capturing demand and maintaining sanity. The shops that thrive—the ones that consistently hit profit margins while keeping staff retention high—aren't lucky. They've built intentional production scheduling systems that match job intake to realistic capacity.

Let's talk about how to do that.

Know Your True Production Capacity

Before you can schedule anything, you need an honest baseline: how many units can each station actually produce per day?

This isn't theoretical. It's measured.

For screen printing, this means:

• Single-color prints on 12-piece orders: 45–80 shirts/hour (depending on press type, flash cure time, and operator experience)
• Four-color prints with flash cures: 20–35 shirts/hour
• Discharge or specialty inks: 15–25 shirts/hour (longer cure times)

For embroidery:

• Small logos (5,000–10,000 stitches): 8–12 pieces/hour
• Large designs (25,000+ stitches): 3–6 pieces/hour

For DTG:

• Standard white-base prints: 12–18 pieces/hour (including pretreatment drying time)
• Complex four-color designs: 6–10 pieces/hour

The mistake most shops make: they use ideal numbers (what the equipment can do under perfect conditions) instead of real numbers (what actually happens when your operator needs a bathroom break, talks to a customer, or has an off day).

Action: Run a time study. Pick one job type per station. Track actual output for 3–5 consecutive days. Account for setup, changeover, quality checks, and downtime. That's your real capacity.

Factor in Setup and Changeover Time

A common scheduling mistake: forgetting that every job has invisible time attached to it.

When you switch from one screen printing job to another, you're losing:

• Screen cleanup (5–15 minutes)
• Ink mixing or color matching (5–10 minutes)
• Registration setup (10–20 minutes)
• Test prints and adjustments (5–15 minutes)
• Total: 25–60 minutes per job change

With embroidery, hooping and design programming can eat 10–20 minutes per SKU change.

Most job management systems (including Kontraktr) allow you to log setup time by production method and design complexity. Use that data. If you're scheduling 10 different screen printing jobs across a single day, you're burning 4–10 hours just on setup.

Better strategy: batch similar jobs together. Four 50-piece orders in the same color? Run them consecutively. You'll cut changeover time dramatically and actually increase daily output.

Build a Realistic Master Schedule

Your production schedule should answer three questions:

1. What's coming in? (orders by date, complexity, and deadline)
2. What's capacity? (realistic units/hour per station)
3. What's the order? (which jobs run when, based on deadline priority and batching logic)

Here's a practical framework:

Daily Capacity Planning

Assume:

• 8 hours of production time per shift
• 10–15% buffer for maintenance, quality rework, and unexpected delays
• Your real usable capacity = 7–7.5 hours per station

Example for a single-station screen printing shop:

• Realistic daily capacity: 300–400 finished shirts (assuming mix of 1–4 color jobs)
• With two operators and two press stations: 600–800 shirts/day
• Weekly capacity: 3,000–4,000 shirts (accounting for one maintenance day)

Now you know your answer to customers: "We can commit to jobs that total 3,500 shirts per week without overtime."

Job Sequencing Rules

When multiple jobs hit your queue, schedule in this order:

1. Deadline first – Jobs due soonest run first
2. Then batch by type – Similar jobs (same color family, same garment type) run consecutively
3. Then by size – Smaller orders often move faster through changeovers
4. Buffer high-complexity jobs – Discharge prints, multi-location designs, or custom colors get scheduled with extra time

Example Week

Monday:

• 8 AM–12 PM: Two 100-piece orders, white ink, standard t-shirts (batched together)
• 12 PM–1 PM: Lunch + 30-min maintenance check
• 1 PM–5 PM: One 150-piece discharge job (longer cure time = lower daily target)

Tuesday:

• 8 AM–1 PM: Four small orders (50 pieces each), various colors, embroidery (batched by design complexity)
• 1 PM–2 PM: Lunch + prep for next day
• 2 PM–5 PM: DTG pretreatment and printing for three orders

Notice: Monday is heavy on production volume (350 pieces) but uses batching. Tuesday mixes production methods to avoid burnout and maximize machine utilization.

Build in Contingency (and Actually Use It)

The best production schedules fail without realistic buffer time.

Set aside 10–15% of weekly capacity as unscheduled buffer for:

• Quality rework (rescreening, reprinting)
• Equipment hiccups
• Sick days
• Rush orders (because they always happen)

If your capacity is 3,500 units/week, only commit 3,000 units/week to regular customers. The remaining 500 units lets you say yes to profitable rush work without throwing your schedule into chaos.

This is the difference between a shop that's constantly stressed and one that's consistently profitable.

Track and Adjust Monthly

Your schedule isn't static. Every month, audit:

• Actual vs. planned output per station (did you hit capacity?)
• Average job completion time (is it longer than expected?)
• Rework rate (how much time is spent fixing quality issues?)
• Overtime hours (are you burning out staff?)

If you're consistently missing capacity, either:

• Your baseline numbers are wrong (recalculate)
• You're taking on jobs outside your sweet spot (be pickier)
• You need to invest in training or equipment
• You're over-staffed or under-staffed (staffing models should match seasonal demand)

Tools like production scheduling features in Kontraktr let you log actual times against estimated times, so you can spot these gaps fast.

The Profit Benefit

When you schedule intentionally, three things happen:

1. You stop leaving money on the table. You know your real capacity, so you can confidently quote aggressive timelines without panic.
2. Quality improves. Rushed work = defects = rework = lost profit. A realistic schedule kills that cycle.
3. Staff stays. Overwork and chaos drive turnover. A schedule your team can actually manage reduces burnout and keeps skilled people around.

Shops using disciplined production scheduling typically see:

• 10–15% increase in on-time delivery
• 20–30% reduction in rework and scrap
• 15–25% higher profit margin (due to less overtime and fewer defects)

Your Next Step

Start here: Pick one production method (screen printing, embroidery, or DTG). Track actual output and changeover time for one week. Write down the number. That's the foundation of a schedule that actually works.

Then, batch your jobs intentionally this week. See what happens.

Small shops often think scheduling is a luxury for big operations. It's not. It's the single most important lever for converting capacity into profit and keeping your team sane.