Security Company:
“The most important things to me about a uniform program are: that the uniforms have to be available to us when we need them and on short order deadlines.
“We evaluate our normal suppliers on service levels, one aspect of which is: of all the items that are ordered, what percentage of them is shipped as opposed to being back ordered. The other aspect is: if the agreed upon target is to get the uniform to the employee within 2 to 3 days, what’s the service level in terms of meeting that objective?
“We won’t talk to a uniform company that won’t ship uniforms on the day of the order or the next day. Once you get beyond that, it’s the other issues that differentiate suppliers.
“We’ve just got to move past this paper stuff. It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s just too complicated and we couldn’t control the process and we weren’t going to add 5 people to do it.
“The big unknown is what I call ‘the shrinkage’ or ‘leakage’ around the edges. That’s when you hire an employee, then uniform them and if they stay with you, their uniforms wear out and you have to replenish them. When the employee leaves you’re supposed to get the uniforms back, but you don’t. All these transactions, unless you’re automated, you can’t possibly control, particularly the “getting back”, because it’s very difficult for a company to go after an employee who didn’t turn something back in if you don’t have a crisp way of doing it – it’s just too hard.
“We intuitively know that the shrinkage or leakage is a significant number. If a company doesn’t have a significant number, then they are paying a tremendous amount to be sure it isn’t.
“The biggest frustration I’ve had with our old uniform program is not being able to comprehensively assure the owners of the company that we’re spending what we should be spending. I can’t say to them that we don’t have a lot of leakage. I can’t quantify it. That’s why we approached our uniform vendors and asked: ‘Can you help us automate this?’ They responded that they didn’t have anything. Many suppliers will say they do it, but they don’t. They have automated purchase orders, automated confirmations, electronic invoicing, but they don’t have the database of the people bouncing against the database of what they’re authorized to receive and how much money they’re authorized to spend. When the employee leaves, they’re not automatically removed from the system so that they can’t place any more uniform orders on the company’s behalf.
“We spent one and a half years looking for a solution to this.
“IT is the key. You’ve got to interface with something. You have to get the information as to what uniforms and duty gear are being used at what locations and that takes some computer interfaces. The Unitec system does all of this. Their system is linked to the employee database – it’s self-contained.
