Comment by bane

Thanks for providing some clarification and color to my very hazy brain dump.

I do remember my parent's "climate controlled" filing room and filing system for client artwork and other sundry. It was basically a big storage room filled with racks of old paper shipping boxes and large grey envelopes. The customer order would get written up on triplicate carbon free paper (customer, contact info, type of job, ink, references to artwork, due date etc), one color for the front office, one for the "lookup" catalog (organized by customer name) and one would go on the front of the envelope. All the artwork, disks, negatives, proofs, a few final samples and other assets for the job would go in the envelope and get organized onto a shelf.

Every job generated a new job number that was something like yearmonth-sequential# so a job coming in today might be 201403-38 and jobs folders were roughly organized by the 201403 part.

If a customer came in and said "I want another 10,000 of that job I had you print lat Oct" we'd go to the catalog, lookup their name, find the 201310-# job and go pull it from the shelf to review. It usually took just a few minutes to find something. I think every 7 or 8 years we'd go through and purge old files just because there simply wasn't the physical space.

They'd also use the job # part of the serial, when writing up jobs, to keep a rough estimate on business volume. Since every month the job # started back over at 1, and you knew that you'd on average do 600 jobs a month, you could get a feel if the month was slow or fast just be seeing what the next job id was going to be on a given date.

The job id's were then used in scheduling. For a long time my father drew up the schedules by hand. He had a grid printed up on large format paper, and I remember him coming home every day with a stack of the front office carbon-free copies for the day and drawing up the production schedule on the grid.

I think the hours of the work day were along the top of the grid and the equipment operator was along the side. He used some kind of color coding system (with the full job # and a legend) to trace the job through the work-day as it moved through various pieces of equipment and such, and he'd use some known metrics for how long it'd take to do that kind of job on this or that equipment, and budget it out. There was quite an art to it. Especially for big jobs that spanned multiple days that needed to be kept track of.

It was kind of a Gantt chart, but a little different. And it provided a clear visualization of all the production going on at a glance. He'd make a couple copies and one would go in the production room so any operator could go check it for their next job, or to see if they were on schedule (sometimes they didn't agree and they'd go make their case for a schedule adjustment).

Sometime in the late 90s he finally got a computer and reproduced the entire thing in Excel, which meant he could do all the scheduling at work instead of at home. When they finally sold their company, the new owners were impressed enough with the system that I think they adopted it for their business.