Many print shops worry about the fall-into-winter rush of last-minute school orders, holiday merch drops, and corporate gift runs. Your phones ring off the hook, your site chat messenger can barely keep up, your operators are buried in overtime, and even the most seasoned managers scramble to keep production flowing.
The problem isn’t that your team isn’t working hard enough. It’s more likely that too much of your workflow still depends on human labor that can’t flex enough. The secret? It isn’t more labor. It’s actually automation.
The Labor Market Reality
For many shops, hiring more people to head off the holiday rush isn’t realistic. One reason is that average wages for production staff have risen 20% or 30% over the past five years, yet people can’t simply increase their output that much without additional resources.
Plus, skilled operators are harder to find and keep. Many shop owners report a two to three months’ lead time to hire and train a competent press or embroidery operator. Without offering a competitive salary and benefits, many of these full-time employees move on within a year or two. That’s why bringing in temporary workers isn’t going to bridge the skill gap to handle decorated-apparel workflows.
In addition, if you don’t have standardized processes, every staffer will do things differently, from dwell times to peel speeds to RIP settings. Then, the more new people you add, the messier your production workflow becomes, and it slows throughput. Overtime costs will also soar. For example, even one extra operator at $18 an hour for 15 hours of overtime a week adds $400 every week, with no guarantee orders move faster or more accurately.
Why Automation Matters
If you take the time to review your shop’s processes to systematize and automate them, you’ll be ahead of your competitors, especially at the holidays. No matter how many orders and rushes you stack up, your team can run leaner, more consistently, and maybe most importantly, less stressed. Consider that printers with automated workflows can turn jobs around faster and faster, even same-day with direct-to-film (DTF) and UVDTF (ultraviolet) printing. The last thing you want is a customer complaining, “Printer A can do it in two days, so why can’t you?”
Step one is that your systems and workflows must run consistently on every shift. Once you’ve created SOPs, it’s time to automate repetitive tasks like chasing art approvals, RIP setup, and film cutting. That way, your staff can focus on printing, quality control, and customer relations. Every step you can automate creates “unattended time” where machines work while operators do higher-value tasks.
If you commit to automating some processes before the holidays, you can handle larger order volumes and last-minute jobs without adding headcount. When you track how long your workflow steps take and see where to automate, you can aim to run 15% to 20% more jobs in a day with the same number of operators.
Here’s Where Shops Waste the Most Labor
Before you can fix your workflow, you need to know exactly where the hours (and dollars) are being wasted.
1. Chasing art approvals
One of the biggest bottlenecks in the order process is waiting for a client to sign off on art approval, leading to downtime and lower profits. The average shop can lose one to three days per order waiting for customer sign-off. Consider that a single stalled art approval can hold up hundreds of items in a school spiritwear run or holiday webstore order. Plus, your customer service and sales staff can spend hours a week emailing or calling customers for approvals. During the holidays, when customers might not be as readily available, they risk losing their production slots.
2. Working on RIPs
Manually tweaking ink limits, halftones, or underbase can result in a loss of five to 10 minutes per job. At 40 jobs a day, that’s three to seven hours of wasted labor, equivalent to losing an operator’s entire shift every week. Plus, if you aren’t consistent with your RIPs, that can cause banding or color mismatches, leading to reprints and more wasted labor.
3. Film cutting and sorting
If your team is hand-cutting 400 transfer sheets a day, that’s two to three hours of lost time. Another one to two hours can be allocated to sorting, stacking, and relabeling tasks. This repetitive work keeps skilled operators from pressing the highest-value role in your shop. In addition, if you’re asking experienced staff to cut transfers, that can feel like busywork that lowers their morale.
4. Press inconsistency
Without standard “recipes,” two operators will press the same transfer differently, as wrong dwell, peeling too early, or skipping pre-press steps. When that happens, your reprint rates can spike 10% to 15% during your shop’s busiest seasons. That can turn into hundreds (or thousands) of lost dollars every week.
5. Manual scheduling and staging
Shop managers often play “air traffic control,” constantly deciding which job goes next or tweaking things on the fly. Manual scheduling can consume one to two hours or more a day of decision-making and troubleshooting. Jobs can run behind simply because an approval is late or a platen swap wasn’t planned. Operators waste time asking “what’s next” vs. looking at an online schedule and grabbing the next job that’s been set up already.
The first step is to look at your own shop and “diagnose” the areas that slow your team down, like:
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Have we had to reprint 20 or more shirts in one day due to press or curing mistakes?
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Have we paid overtime every week because jobs consistently linger past their in-hand date?
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Are orders sitting two to three days waiting for customer approval, while your presses sit idle?
What Automation Looks Like in a Streamlined Shop
Take a look at these areas you can automate in your shop and see where you have room to eliminate time-consuming tasks:
Digital automation
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Do your proofs move automatically into a production queue as soon as they’re approved, without a rep needing to push a button manually
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Do your art approval reminders go out on schedule, so a stalled job never sits for days waiting on a client to take action?
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Do your orders flow directly from online stores into your production queue with pre-checked artwork?
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Does your scheduling run in the background, slotting jobs into the correct order based on deadlines, capacity, and press and operator availability?
Hardware automation
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Do you have a roll-to-sheet cutter that can turn out 400 sheets an hour unattended, freeing your operators to keep prepping blanks, pressing, doing QC, or packaging?
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Do your printer setups have inline powder shakers and tunnel dryers that give you consistent cure temperatures and reduce adhesion failures?
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Do your printer setups have automated take-up systems that allow you to schedule overnight production runs, so you have hundreds of transfers ready to press in the morning?
Workflow automation
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Does every job move in FIFO (first in, first out) bins with recipe cards or barcodes, so that your operators grab the next bin, scan it, and press without supervisor intervention?
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Have you posted “recipes” that standardize dwell time, temperatures, and peel type, so operators consistently press transfers on cotton tees, performance wear, and hoodies?
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Do you group jobs automatically by platen size or fabric, aiming to cut setup changes by 30 to 40 per shift?
For example, if you’re a mid-sized shop with two operators pressing 300 transfers a day, you could double your output with no overtime with auto-cutting and batching rules. One operator could potentially focus on QC and packing, reducing late orders and client complaints.
Pro tip: Automation doesn’t mean “robots replacing people” in your shop. Instead, it’s a powerful way to automate time-consuming tasks to free up your existing staff to work more efficiently.
Reap These Benefits Beyond Labor Savings
Cutting labor hours is nice, but the real wins of automation show up in quality, growth, and happier people on both sides of the order.
Consistency: Once you’ve standardized RIP profiles and press recipes, ensure identical results across operators and shifts, then you can drop your reprint rate, especially during the holidays. Every avoided reprint saves one blank garment ($5 to $15), five to 10 minutes of operator time, wasted film, powder, and inks, as well as shipping costs. Over a month, cutting reprints in half could save your shop hundreds of dollars in saved labor and materials.
Scalability without new hires: Automation lets shops take on big contracts or seasonal rushes without scrambling to add staff. For example, if your shop is running school spiritwear stores, you could triple your order volume from five to 15 stores with the same number of operators once batching and auto-approvals are in place.
Employee morale and retention: When you remove repetitive busywork like cutting film and chasing proofs from skilled staff, they’re more motivated with higher-level tasks. This can potentially reduce turnover by 10% to 15% when automation helps mitigate burnout during the Q4 crunch.
Customer satisfaction: The reality is that your clients don’t care how long or hard your team worked on their order. They care about on-time delivery and consistent quality. With automation, you can confidently accept rush orders, and your quality will be uniform across all pieces in a client’s order. That consistency will result in repeat business, as in a multi-year recurring account with a company, school, or team.
Competitive advantage: Shops that aren’t automated usually turn away rush orders. If you’re the shop that can confidently say “yes” to a higher-ticket, 48-hour turnaround job, you’ll win long-term customers other shops can’t.
Less stress for owners and managers: Many decorating shop owners experience stress and burnout, especially during the holiday season, when they stay late consistently to fix bottlenecks. With automation, you can set up predictable workflows for fewer late nights and upset clients.
Quick Wins Shops Can Implement Now
You don’t need to overhaul your entire shop overnight. A few simple tweaks can start saving you hours every week.
1. Automate your shop’s proof approvals.
How to do it: Set auto email or text reminders at 24 hours and four hours before the cutoff.
This can save you two to three staff hours a week in follow-ups.
Example: A 50-order/week shop cut approval lag from two days to less than one day.
2. Lock in RIP presets and templates.
How to do it: Build one-click profiles for cotton, blends, polyester, and the most common types of garments you decorate.
This can save eight minutes/job, adding up to over five hours/week at 40 jobs/day. You’ll also be able to prevent banding and complaints about color mismatches.
3. Standardize your press recipes.
How to do it: Laminate instructions for every transfer type, including temperature, dwell times, and peel types.
You could train new hires in two to three days instead of two weeks. Your shop’s reprint could also fall by 5% to 10% if your staff follows printing recipes consistently.
4. Batch jobs logically.
How to do it: Group your daily or weekly jobs by platen size, fabric, or heat profile.
This can cut 30 to 40 platen swaps per shift, saving up to two hours/day. You’ll keep operators in the workflow instead of constantly resetting.
5. Set up FIFO bins with recipe cards.
How to do it: Set up each bin with job details and press recipes, so jobs never get lost in the shuffle.
Managers can gain back one hour a day from answering staff’s “what’s next” questions.
6. Start small and stack.
How to do it: Implement one automation at a time, like proof reminders, then RIP presets, then batching.
Even one change can save you five to 10 hours a month. Small wins build staff buy-in and momentum toward bigger automation upgrades.
Future-Proof With Smart Investments
First, review these typical shop red flags to see if you’re past due for automation:
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Jobs are piling up at the curing station even when presses are idle.
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Your operators are spending more time cutting/sorting film than actually pressing.
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You’re paying overtime every single week just to keep up with orders.
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Your reprint rate is more than 100% on rush jobs because operators are cutting corners.
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You’re turning away webstore or school contracts because current staff can’t handle the extra load.
Most shops aim to invest in equipment every year or two, and now might be a good time to think strategically about what can help you achieve your goals.
For example:
Roll-to-roll DTF printers with inline powder and curing: These printer setups can run continuously, producing 200 to 300 sq. ft. of transfers per hour. That way, your operators don’t have to stand and monitor the machine, freeing up one to two full shifts per week.
Automated take-up systems: With this feature, you can keep long jobs moving without jams. You can even set up overnight, unattended printing and start the next day with hundreds of transfers ready to press.
Tunnel dryers: These ensure even, consistent curing across large runs, as well as reduce
“mystery failures” where some garments are under- and over-cured.
Inline shakers: With this feature, you can automate adhesive application, eliminating the variability of manual powdering that results in edge lifts and inconsistent results.
If you’re concerned about spending funds on new equipment, here are some ways you’ll see ROI:
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Labor savings: If you save 10 minutes per job × 150 jobs a week × $18/hour, you’re saving $450 a week.
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Waste: Eliminating 20 reprints a week × $8 per transfer saves $160 a week. (That doesn’t even take into account the cost of the blank and labor.)
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Capacity upside: Taking 20 extra jobs per week × $40 average margin comes out to $800 a week in additional profit.
Just those three line items could total up to $1,400 a week or nearly $70,000 a year, enough to cover a hardware lease in under 12 months.
Future-Proof Your Shop With Smart Investments
Labor will often be among your shop’s biggest expenses, and the hardest one to keep under control. You can’t predict when a team member will quit, call out, or hit burnout during Q4. What you can control is how much of your workflow actually depends on that labor. Every automation step you put in place makes your shop:
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More predictable, since deadlines aren’t at the mercy of human error.
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More profitable, with fewer wasted hours, blanks, and reprints.
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Less stressful, since owners and managers stop firefighting, and staff stop working midnights and weekends.
This year, you could set up a much easier Q4, without begging your tired team to work overtime, or reprinting 30 hoodies the night before delivery. Automation doesn’t replace your people. Instead, it protects them from burnout and protects you from margin drain. It gives your shop the breathing room to grow instead of just “surviving” the season.
That’s where Arcus Printers comes in. We build our printer systems to streamline every choke point in your production workflow: pre-tuned RIP profiles that eliminate guesswork, inline powder and curing for consistent unattended runs, and matched films and consumables for predictable, repeatable output. Together, that means less tinkering, fewer reprints, and higher throughput from day one.
Ready to labor less and print more? See how Arcus systems help shops like yours handle the Q4 crunch without getting super-stressed at ArcusPrinters.com.
