Operations4 min read
Badge printing, measured
Throughput numbers from real doors — what a single printer sustains, and where the queue starts to build.
By Devin OseiProgramme design
A badge printer has a rated speed and an actual speed. The gap between them is where queues come from.
Rated speed assumes a print job already formatted and waiting. Actual speed includes the scan, the lookup, the confirmation, and the hand-off. In practice a single station sustains roughly one hundred and twenty badges an hour with a trained operator, and rather less in the first thirty minutes while everyone is finding their rhythm.
The implication is arithmetic. A conference expecting four hundred people in the first hour needs either four stations or a pre-printed list. Choosing on the morning is choosing the queue.