Production Timeline Delays at Promotional Products Agencies: How Miscommunication Starts

The majority of production delays experienced by promotional products agencies are caused by delays that occur as a result of internal processes not being managed by staff at the agency in a timely manner, as opposed to slow vendors or equipment failure.

Why production timeline delays at promotional products agencies start before production begins

The vendor gets blamed. It’s become such a default position that it’s now almost a reflex action. A late delivery to a function, etc, and immediately everyone starts talking about the supplier’s lead times, the freight carrier and the difficult factory overseas.

Delays caused by weather, mechanical problems and other external issues do cause delays. However, the majority of delays are not caused by such external issues.

A Promotional Products Agency typically has several internal departments to handle each order before the purchase order is sent to a supplier. A Sales Person takes the order, the Art Department creates the artwork for the decoration and the Production Department places the buy and arranges for the job to be completed. There are therefore three potential transitions where information may go missing, assumptions could have been made or never have been communicated in the first place.

A promotional products agency is NOT a Project Management Firm. But a promotional products agency can be run like a Project Management Firm. Hundreds of projects are run by one agency at the same time and more so during peak periods. All have to be completed before specific event dates. Under such pressure same types of communication failure modes can occur as with a typical PM Firm.

The three internal handoffs most likely to break a production timeline at a promotional products agency

These transitions are so normal and so common that I see them all the time, and that’s why I say they feel safe, but they’re not.

Sales to art

When a salesperson places an order he will send the brief to the art department (decoration request is in the brief). This can also be done by note in slack or even by email.

Most specs are missing Imprint color specifications stated in the client-approved Pantone Values, not descriptions; Complete size and placement information; File format requirements for the decorator or vendor. "Send me a logo" and "send me a 2-color vector at 3 inches wide centered on the front" are not the same request. The art goes first to create a file which is not useable by the production team.

This is a gap of precision. It costs days.

Art to production

Although the proof has been approved by Art, he does not seem to consider his task complete.

Production do not receive the entire scenario when receiving a file for production. For example: Which supplier we have chosen to use, The agreed unit price with said supplier, Whether items are to be pad printed or screen printed, The amount of a rush upcharge, Whether the approved proof from client matches the template from supplier i.e. Is it to be used as is or amended in some way. This information may have been in email trail from 3 days prior or a phone call and therefore never written down or simply a discussion that has never been formally documented.

Production back to sales (and out to the client)

There are many additional costly problems that may not be so obvious to recognize. The first is that production has hit a road block. The minimum order quantity for this product has changed. Also, the color chosen for this particular product design is not a color option for this particular item. Also, the vendor needs a different file.

Production knows. Does sales? Does the client?

The delays from the time a problem surfaces until we can do something about it as a customer, are primarily caused by no one owning the communication from problem in production until it is your issue as a customer. By the time information makes its way around the entire loop to notify you of the problem and give you a chance to fix it, it is generally too late.

What a broken handoff actually looks like inside a promotional products agency

Here's a scenario that is not unusual.

We received an order from a corporate client for 500 custom totes for a product launch in 6 weeks. The salesperson took the order over the phone and put the basic details into the CRM system. He then sent a Slack message to the art department requesting a proof. The Slack message says "bags for Clearwater, logo + tagline, ship by the 14th."

Art builds the proof. It looks right. It gets sent to the client for approval.

When opening up the approved file for production, it is quickly realized that the logo was created in RGB for the web and not in spot color for the decoration method. The tagline font was not outlined or converted to a vector and no verification was done to confirm whether the bag chosen by the client is actually available in the specific color required by the client for this season. Vendor needs a corrected file and formal PO to begin a 10 day production run.

It takes 2 days to fix that file for that mistake. This then means the 10 day window becomes 12 days plus 3 days for shipping. So, 1 week of the 6 weeks to the event has already past by before we even start looking for that file to fix the mistake.

These mistakes cost the agency the client because of four trivial bits of information that were not known by any of the staff and therefore could not have been avoided by sharing them.

How a knowledge layer fixes the root cause of production timeline delays at promotional products agencies

Information that needs to be handed over at handovers is scattered across different systems and is only available at different times. It does not automatically include the information that the next person needs. People are not careless here.

A knowledge layer basically changes the architecture of this problem.

LemonLime integrates with existing tools of the promotional products agency, like Slack, HubSpot, Google Workspace, Microsoft, etc. LemonLime continuously ingests and structures the data of said tools in the knowledge layer of the business, which is optimized for efficient AI retrieval and reasoning. No scripts. No IT project. The knowledge layer of the business gets continuously richer while business as usual is conducted.

The AI operating on this layer never has to recall information of a Production Coordinator like what Pantone colors where approved for a job, did the customer already confirm the proof revisions or what the vendor needs for the files for a specific decoration method. Information retrieval from the job files happens as needed through AI, instead of relying on the staff members' memory.

The biggest impact of this change will be at handoff points, such as when an artist sends a job off to production. At that point, production will need information that the artist already knows, but the artist may not think to pass along. A knowledge layer will provide this information instead of leaving it to chance.

Cutting handoffs between teams by a day or two per job for a promotional products agency that runs as short-cycle projects to hard event dates for their clients (e.g. for a conference in 10 days) can compound very quickly for a agency receiving a large volume of orders in a single month. Delays do not decrease as workload decreases, they decrease as information that always existed in the workflow (and caused the delay in the first place) becomes findable when it is needed.

LemonLime is on the waitlist at lemonlime.ai, and it's built specifically for teams that want AI drawing from their real business data rather than guessing around it.

What promotional products agencies should do this month

Start with a Handoff Audit, Not a Technology Purchase.

Plot the last 5 jobs that ran over time, identify the point where things got stuck for each of them: Is it a brief being lost between sales and art, a file between art and production, exceptions between production and the client.

Late work for most agencies has 2-3 core failure points and you should focus on solving those problems to fix late work.

Once the failure points are established one can then ask whether the problems are a process problem, an information-access problem or both. Most agencies have both problems. Establishing process standards on how to complete a brief can reduce the frequency of the problem of incomplete briefs. A knowledge layer then can reduce the costs of those errors that do still occur.

Connect 1 tool (i.e. Slack, CRM) to get an idea of what other information your team would need to pull in to answer questions that currently would take hours to dig out of email threads. Can layering work for your agency?

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does my promotional products agency keep missing production deadlines even when we start jobs early?

Additional time at the beginning of the process will not address handoff failures. While incomplete information may be corrected by the art team at the beginning of the job, that is taking away from the time to develop the job. Additional lead time is not the answer to this problem. What is needed is complete information at each handoff between departments. LemonLime’s AI knowledge layer provides the necessary information for a smooth handoff and any corrections needed can be addressed prior to becoming a problem.

Why do my sales and production teams always seem to be working from different information?

Most systems pull in lots of information, but they miss key details. For Sales, that information typically resides in a CRM for them. For Production, that information typically resides in files, emails, vendor portals, etc. Most systems don’t integrate well with the systems that matter to you. LemonLime bridges systems that matter to you and builds a shared knowledge base of information for your job. Whether it’s account history from a Sales person’s CRM or spec details from a Production team’s various specs, LemonLime pulls in the information you need for your job.

What's the fastest type of production timeline delay for a promotional products agency to fix?

The exception handling lag is primarily the knowledge lag between the time a problem surfaces in production and the time that the people who need to know about it are notified. This is a communication / routing problem that is largely separate from the hard technology problems, and thus can be solved fairly quickly. The key is to notify the right person (s) and have them be able to reference the full job history. That history currently resides in 5 systems, thus the knowledge layer required to solve this problem is routing to notification and making that notification accurate.

How do I figure out where my agency's handoff breakdowns are actually happening?

Audit your last batch of late jobs (e.g. last 10 jobs) to figure out where each one went wrong. Identify the point where the information flow stopped (e.g. where was the fault in the brief, where was the fault in proof approval, where was the fault in PO transmission, where was the fault in exception handling call). There is usually one culprit in a small sample size of late jobs. Go after the one handoff that you need to fix first.

Can AI actually help with production communication at a small promotional products agency?

Most general purpose AI applications do not know anything about the jobs of its users, their customers or their vendors. But an AI that is running on a knowledge layer, built from the real data of a user – their Slack, their CRM, their email history etc – is a completely different ball game. LemonLime has been built for this exact purpose – connecting up to the applications that users already use on a day to day basis, and then running AI that answers questions from the user's actual data, as opposed to data that has been put into a generic training data set.

Will adding another tool make internal communication at my agency worse before it gets better?

It depends. Adding another place for manual data entry is generally worse. The way LemonLime functions is to pull data from systems that your team already uses. So in effect, it adds a new retrieval layer on top of your current workflow. The knowledge layer that we’ve built on top of the retrieval layer, however, is on top of what your team is currently doing today. Therefore, the adoption friction from the very beginning is minimal.