I just signed up for a networking event at Tech Town here in Detroit and didn't realize that I was in need of business cards (which I will fix with a root cause analysis later). I decided to find a quick place to get some made. Low and behold, Staples has a program called Instant Business Cards where I could craft business cards online or at their store and have them printed and cut immediately.
Instant Business Cards does work, however, only the printing and cutting portion of are instant.
Right First Time - Not even close...tons of rework:
Short version - At home, I spent almost an hour putting the business card together, why: when I zoomed in and out of the design screen the font size, spacing and alignment kept re-adjusting, the online software kept crashing also.
I called Staples for some tech support to ask what I should do. Response: "Just submit it and if something looks off we will call you . Oh and the system doesn't always display the "proof" properly."
More rework:
I decided to go to Staples and use their business card kiosk for some live support. While at the kiosk I was able to type in my information very quickly and put all the font and character sizes in - sufficiently memorized from the 6 plus attempts to do it online. I zoomed in, zoomed out and the font sizes again changed. I now have a live person named Patrick to help me.
Passing the buck:
I asked him for some help. He tried to do it...same error... His response: "It's a third party application so we don't have any control over it. Let me know if I can do anything else to help." "You might want to try a different font, but if you really need that one I can re-do it for you. However, there will be a custom charge/fee and a fee to expedite the cards."
I told him "Not to worry. I want to finish this process and see what the end result is. At the very least I'll have fodder for my Lean blog."
Cross your fingers job processing:
So I hit enter to see the proof and nothing happened. The Adobe Acrobat program doesn't launch, it just gave me a big red "X". Hence no proof. Patrick's response "Just submit it and I'll print it and we'll see what happens." So although I couldn't see what it would look like, I had to type in my initials to approve the image.
We printed and cut 10 and they looked good, so I gave him the OK to do the other 90. This part really is instant, it only took about 3 minutes total.
Circled in red are the areas where the proof displayed the card incorrectly.
Proof from home printer Final Product
Out of the total 73min. spent on this, approximately 65 min. (89%) was rework
BTW: I don't blame Patrick: A bad process will beat good people any day of the week!
