Today I spent about two hours doing "job shadowing" on the factory floor where check orders are fulfilled. According to the schedule I received, this was actually supposed to be a full half-day process, with a half hour slot allotted to each section of the factory and a lunch break in the middle. In reality, each part of the process only took about fifteen to twenty minutes.

I found it all very intersting, though. I started off at 9:30 when I was delivered to my first department and found out that the person who I was meant to be shadowing is on vacation! So after some different people were talked to and the confusion was worked through, I was introduced to the woman who was working the area this morning. Sadly, I neglected to write down her name, but she was very nice.

This department was called Printware, but I'm still not certain why. I should have asked! But basically it's where they begin the process of filling an order by making plates. Orders come in on a master computer and are processed by a supervisor and sent to individual workstations. These are processed, which sends two several printers at once: a plate printer, which prints on sheets of a polyester substance, a big continuous-feed thing that prints bar-codes and job numbers on perforated sheets, and a regular old laser printer that spits out a tracking sheet. The Printware person then assembled all these things together in folders, and when enough of these are accumulated, they are stacked a certain way on shelves to be picked up for the next step in the process.

Which is the Stock department. The Stock department consists of several long, tall rows of warehouse-type shelves, filled with stacks and stacks and stacks of... stock. Paper stock, to be specific. Poster-sized sheets of paper, all preprinted with anywhere from 12 to 15 individual checks on them, or 12 to 15 deposit slips, or 12 to 15 carbon-copy duplicate checks. I was given a brief tour of this area by a young woman named Zabrina. At one end of the long rows of shelves is a noisier area where there are three machines, each bigger than the last one, that are used to collate this stock. That means they take the paper with the deposit slips on it, and the paper with the checks, and the carbon copy stuff and sort it all together into combined stacks that are then ready to go off to the presses.

I learned a couple interesting facts in the Stock department. Almost all of the stock is printed in Canada! The graphic designers here create the art and put the files for the checks together, and then it all gets sent to some big commercial printer in Canada before it comes back here in paper form. I also learned that the Stock department here manages inventory for the other check printing operation in Arkansas that this company owns, and that we send regular shipments of check stock down there via truck.

Stock considers the Press department their "internal customer," as everything they do is generally to supply the press operators with the materials they use to do their job. Zabrina dropped me off with David, who runs the Press team on first shift. I didn't have as many questions for him, as I have worked/interned in several different print shops and have a general knowledge of how printing presses work. It was interesting to see these specialized presses just for printing checks, though. They have these huge rotating parts that pull out of the side of the press, with little tiny rotating drums with numbers on them. These are what print the individual check numbers. There are two sets of them so that the press operator can set up the next job while the current one is running. Each press also has a big mirror on the back of it so that the pressman can see the cylinders in operation while standing at the front of the machine, so that if anything binds up they can catch it and shut down before it gets out of control.

Next, David left me with Dena, who was in charge of the Business area. I wasn't sure what that meant, but it turns out it's just another part of the Press area that only works on business checks. Checks for businesses. There were only three presses there, and since business checks are only a small fraction of the company's overall business, only two of them were running. They looked very similar to the regular presses, but I'm sure there were some differences, since they print on different stock.

Moving on, I came to the QA/Packing area, where a very nice woman named Teresa ended up showing me around her area and the next one, as they sort of blend together seamlessly. (The next area was called "Kugler/Loach," which I must assume are the names of the machines in use, since no other explanation really makes much sense.) In QA/Packing, they assemble the stacks of checkbook stock, which have now been printed with someone's personal info on them, into the right order to be bound into actual books of checks. As they are assembling, they also do quality checking, making sure that none of the printing is too light or heavy, or smudged, or fingerprinted, or anything else. Those little insert ads that you always find and have to tear out when you start a new book of checks are added at this point. Then, the orders are stacked on boards and sent to the "Kugler." This machine binds the checkbooks with stitches (they look like staples, but they're actually from one long string of wire), cuts them horizontally into strips of three checks each, tapes them, and then cuts them vertically into individual books. I'm not really certain where the "Kugler" ends and the "Loach" begins, but the finished checkbooks are then fed into a stacker which stacks them five high and then moves them onward. Another part of the machine forms the bottom box around each stack and then glues the box together. The boxes then roll down a conveyer belt while a handy-dandy machine with suction cups pulls from an assortment of brochures, transaction records and checkbook covers and dumps them into the boxes. Then another machine puts the box tops on and glues 'em shut. Finally, the closed box is run under a little laser printer that puts the mailing info on the bottom of the box, and then it is immediately shrink-wrapped shut.

If it isn't obvious, I think I found the whole QA/Packing to Kugler/Loach area the most fascinating. Also, the coolest thing: they have these metal bridges that go over the machinery in several places, because it's all a continuous assembly line and to get to the other side without the bridges, you'd be doing a lot of walking.

The last stop on today's job shadowing tour was the Mail Room. Now, it seemed to me that calling it a room was a bit of an overstatement. It's really more of an area. I mean, there are no walls anywhere on this factory floor; it's all one big open room and there are really no divisions at all between the different areas, outside of Stock, other than what is going on in them and the kinds of noises you hear. Well, the Mail "Room" is run by a big guy named Vincent, but he prefers to go by "TJ" (He explained: his middle name's Tom and his last name starts with "J".) TJ struck me as the type of person who is very passionate about certain subjects and can go on talking about them for... a long time. And he did. But I liked his attitude toward his job, which basically involves sorting the finished packages into shipments and then sorting those by shipping method. He looks at it as one last chance to catch problems or mistakes and make sure the customers are getting a quality product. He has a goal for his department of 100% accuracy with no mistakes, and has promised to take his team out for a steak dinner at Outback if they meet this goal. They use the U.S. Postal Service, and the big three, UPS, FedEx and DHL. If TJ had his way, they'd only use UPS. His opinion of DHL is particularly low. TJ was very nice, and said he could give me a discount on UPS shipping if I ever needed it.

So that ended my first "half-day" of job shadowing, all of it in the different areas of the factory floor. It was very interesting and educational, and now I (sort of) know who's who down there. Tomorrow I'll be doing the same thing, only on the office side of things, including the Systems, Accounting, Order/Data Entry & Security,Inventory, and Contact Center departments. Looking forward to it.

Gri"larned"shny