Trust’s Secret Weapon: The Power of Central
Screen printing is a complicated process, especially with the volume we produce and the quality we demand at Trust. We are in no way a large company, or even a large screen printing shop, but we do have 18 people attempting to accomplish one goal with speed and accuracy. For the first 8 years of Trust, we attempted to make this happen with paper job sheets, memorization, and word of mouth. It worked out fine and we feel that we maxed out our capabilities within that system. Matt became slowly unsatisfied with our paper workflow, so he sought out a replacement. Unable to find something that met all of our needs and our incredibly high standards, he decided to just build his own system from the ground up. It became Central.
What is Central?
I’m so glad you asked. Central is a lot of things to different people at Trust. At the most basic level, think of it as the central (get it?) nervous system of Trust. The brain is the Central server, storing countless records in a custom-designed database, and distributing them out to the vast corners of the shop (like nerves running from your brain to your fingertips). Each station along our workflow has an interface to access central. Through iPhones, iPads, laptops and iMacs, each Trust employee taps into the same joint database; inputting information, communicating to other parts of the shop, and turning that information into mockups, inks, prints, etc.
In order to explain how it affects our team, I asked our team members what Central means to them. Here are a few responses:
“Central is a built-from-scratch database that keeps our ideal logic for hundreds of our daily processes on track. From order processing, to pre-production coming together on press, to your shirts arriving on time. Central is programmed with our care and thoughtfulness to keep your shirts and prints successful.” —Matt
“Screen printing is only half of the equation really. The other half is organization/execution of our customers request, What blanks, how many, what sizes, what prints, where do the prints go, how big, what colors, what inks to use, placement of print,where to send them, how much to charge, what screens to use, where to find the screens, what finishing ? The list of what central helps us with is very long and ever growing.” —Jeremy
“It’s what you get when you take the road less traveled. It has led us to a situation where we can all each pour our work into one singular place and take the information we need to be successful into our positions. It’s led to a workplace that could never go back to what it once was.” —Ryan
Where Did Central Come From?
It’s cool that you’re so interested in this! Well the simple answer is that it came from nothing. Our owner and CEO Matt Lucas built it from scratch in a program called Filemaker, which provides a basic framework for building databases. Matt taught himself the software and the scripting language that makes it powerful, and then he spent two years building, tearing down, and rebuilding Central.
This is not a pre-programmed system. It is not something that was just edited or changed to fit our needs, it was built from square one with only Trust and Trust’s needs in mind. There are no extra parts, nothing that doesn’t directly pertain to who we are and how we do business.
What are the Benefits of Central?
Ok, you kind of sound like you’re trying to steal our idea. But fine, I’ll explain it. There are hundreds of small things Central does for different people, but it has three main purposes:
1. Building and Organizing Orders
We do a lot of exciting and fun things at Trust, but the basis of our company is customer orders. The first piece of Central that was built (and by far the most complicated) is the Customer Rep’s interface. That’s because orders are extremely complicated. Tracking blanks, prints, color counts, pricing, payments, shipments and mockups for orders that can have up to 80 designs in them is an incredible undertaking, and would be virtually impossible with pen and paper on the deadlines we work within.
2. Reliable Communication Between Departments
When an Artist chooses the correct pantone color for a print, it is immediately updated on the interfaces of Printers and the Ink Department. When a Customer Rep orders blanks for an order, the exact sizes and quantities are stored, and will show up on the interfaces of Receiving, Printers, and Stackers when the blanks get to them. When a color is changed during a press check, Central will remember the change for any future reprints. These are just a few of the thousands of connections Central is performing between departments and people. In order to move as quickly and efficiently as we do, every person has to be able to input and receive information from a live, updating, communal source.
3. Tracking Statistics and Creating Benchmarks
An added bonus of building and running every order through Central is that we have access to an abundance of statistics about each piece of our shop. We know the answers to “how much?”, “how often?”, and “how quickly?” for every process in our shop. This is invaluable information. It lets us track improvement, setting benchmarks so we can see our processes grow more efficient as we shape them and as we add new, better tools to our arsenal. It shows us trends, extrapolating into graphs and charts that allow us to better understand our business on a macro level. These trends lead to predictions. We can watch sales percentages move up and down and anticipate upcoming peaks and valleys in production’s workload so we can tweak the schedule to avoid empty or overstuffed days.
Outro
Central sets us apart. Without it we are a group of talented, hard working people. With it we are a well-oiled machine. Central is a unique tool, just like our presses, our inks, or our screens. Central is also constantly evolving. With constant updates and tweaks, and with version 2.0 on the very near horizon, Matt (with a little help from your’s truly) has made Central a living part of our team, shifting and shaping itself to fit our exact needs and steadily improving any time we come across an issue. It is an amazing experience to see our technology and our process grow along with us. The hard work of Matt along with the awesome software of Filemaker has given us a dedicated, unique, specialized database that almost feels like a cheat code.
