What to Do With a Batch That Comes Out Off Shade

How to read this sheet

The number the answer turns on is not a cost. It is how many corrective processes the cloth will take before it is no longer first quality whatever the shade is, and almost nobody writes it down. Once that number exists the whole decision changes character: an attempt is not a small commitment, it is one of a very short supply, and spending one on a nine per cent chance is not caution but waste. The sheet prices what one more of them would be worth, which is the argument for a gentler stripping route or a stronger construction. Why the habits are wrong at both ends. A top-up is put on first because it is the cheapest single move, and on a badly off lot it is three wasted processes before the strip that was always going to be needed. A marginally off lot goes back on a machine because correcting it feels like the professional thing to do, when it could have been sold at a concession smaller than the correction costs. Dyehouses fix the easy ones and give up on the hard ones, and the arithmetic wants the opposite: the lots worth real effort are the bad ones, because a marginal lot has somewhere else to go and a wrong one has not. On submitting a shade. The option priced here is submitting the shade openly, declared as a variation, and being told yes or no. It is not shipping something and hoping the inspection misses it, and a band where the buyer would not in fact be told should be entered at nought acceptance - the sheet will then never recommend it. Submission is allowed once in the arithmetic, because a buyer who has refused a shade does not become more likely to accept it on being asked again. What is not modelled. A failed correction is treated as leaving the lot in the same shade band, which is generous to top-ups: in practice a failed top-up is often further off than before and harder to recover, so the case against attempting the bad ones is stronger than the sheet says. Machine availability is ignored, and in a full dyehouse the real cost of a strip is the batch it displaces rather than the chemicals it uses. And nothing here reduces the number of off-shade lots in the first place, which is worth more than every decision on this sheet put together - this is a sheet about what to do when right-first-time has already failed.