Goodbye 2020, Hello 2021

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Bye Bye 2020...

I think everyone is happy to see the back of 2020!

Though 2020 has been a prosperous year for Graphic Warehouse we’re looking forward to some normality returning to our doors (eventually! Come on 2021 don’t be another 2020!)

2020 in reflection...

For all the issues that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused our industry it allowed us internally to make improves or changes we had wanted to make for years!

We’ve listed our three big changes….

Remote Working

Working From Home

This is something we had played with for years so we were internally already set up for it. Since March all of our sales and customer service team have been working remotely.  Being a little paranoid (turns out we weren’t!) we decided to implement remote working about a month before Lockdown 1.

Positives

  • It gives our team more flexibility in working hours
  • We have more space in our offices!
  • We’ve actually seen better team communication!

Negatives

  • Technical issues are a nightmare to diagnose remotely!
  • All communication between team members has turned into being quite formal, we’ve been looking at ways of introducing some fun back into our team meetings that have been lacking since moving to zoom!

Introduction of the Night Shift

Night Shift

We remained open with a skeleton crew in Lockdown 1 to support our customers with NHS contracts & the health & safety industries. 

After Lockdown 1 we slowly began bringing staff back.  In May our workload started to return to normal levels and as such we started to bring staff back.  Our main issue was the need to limit the number of people in production at one time to reduce chances of Covid-19 spreading.

As such we implemented shift bubbles.  2 shifts with a 15 minute air gap in between with a deep clean down and socially distanced handover. So our production department switched to…

  • Day Shift
    09:30 to 18:00
  • Night Shift
    17:45 to 02:15

We had already experimented with this in the past with an early shift and day shift.  The revelation of a permanent night-shift has in increased our production capacity by 150% allowing us to offer quicker turnarounds, same day dispatch and a later cut off time on some products.  Turns out the night-shift is even more productive than our day shift!

Our Newest Piece of Kit

Canon Colorado

So this got this delivered in February 2020 (Read more here).   And after almost a year with it we have to say the Canon Colorado 1650 is one of the best printers ever made.

Speed, Quality and Durability all shoved in to one printer that we couldn’t have been without in 2020.

Here's to a good 2021!

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