HandCraft: Outmaneuvering COVID-19 in North Carolina
When HandCraft Services opened its new 75,600-square-foot (7,023-square-meter) healthcare laundry in High Point, NC, in August 2019, COO Joe McKeown had high hopes for replicating the success of the company’s Richmond, VA-based healthcare plant. Then, when COVID-19 hit in March of this year, the pandemic forced the company – like laundries across the globe – to rethink its strategy.
HandCraft management didn’t flinch at this new challenge. “Our culture is not about ‘woe is me’ and using the market or the environment or a rainstorm or COVID or whatever is the reason why we can’t perform,” McKeown said of the third-generation family-owned company that’s now building another plant in Wilson, NC, that will specialize in healthcare garments. “We just try to make good decisions and manage around all the obstacles. COVID was an obstacle that we had to figure out how to manage. And we figured out how to manage around it as quickly as we could.”
During a tour of HandCraft’s High Point plant earlier this month, Textile Services Weekly saw firsthand how HandCraft has implemented a combination of social distancing, coupled with the use of masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE), to protect its staff and continue providing healthcare linens to hospitals across the Tar Heel State. Despite the pandemic, HandCraft has generated new business that’s nearly doubled its throughput since last year’s opening. The plant began operations with 10.5 million lbs. annually (4,762,719 kg.), which was drawn entirely from poundage transferred from the Richmond plant. Today, HandCraft’s High Point plant is processing 24 million lbs. annually (10,886,216 kg.). This growth has more than made up for the reduced volume of linens from its original base of hospitals that were affected by COVID-19. While HandCraft would almost certainly have enjoyed even faster growth without COVID-19, the fact that it grew its market share despite the pandemic was a major plus. “Probably without COVID, we would be at 27 million (lbs.) because there still is a COVID impact on customers and hospitals,” McKeown said. “If we wouldn’t have gotten any new business, our 10 and a half (million) would have gone to 8 and a half, maybe 9 (million). So it was good that we got new business.”
Keeping staff and customers safe from the virus helped make HandCraft’s successful pivot possible. However, its new high-efficiency plant, built last year from a green-grass site, has played a role as well. The plant has 47 production employees working in a highly automated facility that includes:
- Two Kannegiesser tunnel washers, each with 17, 242 lb. (110 kg.) chambers
- Eighteen 242 lb. (110 kg.) Kannegiesser dryers
- Two pony washers, including a 242 lb. (110 kg.) Tolon and a 75 lb. (22.6 kg.) B&C machine
- A Kannegiesser ETECH soil-on-rail system with 24 sorts and 18 storage rails
- Two rebuilt American Hypro sheet ironers
- Two Chicago Dryer Co. blanket folders
- A JENSEN sheet folder
- Five small-piece folders and one washcloth stacker from Foltex
- A Ludell 30-foot sheet-and-tube heat reclaimer
- Two 100 HP Miura boilers
- A clean-side ETECH rail system
- Diamond chemical injection equipment and laundry chemicals
- Plant construction by ARCO/Murray
Spot cooling and the use of LED lighting throughout the plant provides staff with excellent visibility and enhanced comfort during hot weather. A Plastivac bag-to-baler system from Centurion/Medline whisks away plastic soil bags in the sorting area for automated baling and recycling. This equipment improves efficiency and saves labor.
Early on in the pandemic, a few employees were granted leave if they requested it due to concerns about COVID-19. A few staff members have contracted COVID-19, but they were sent home immediately and there was no disruption in production, McKeown said. Currently, staff morale is high and turnover (HandCraft’s staff are screened by an employment agency) is minimal, he added.
McKeown credits the plant’s highly automated design with reducing ergonomic stress on production employees, while maximizing efficiency. “You don’t have people pushing carts around or lifting,” he said. “Everything is lowered automatically, and all the work is automatically delivered to the workstations. I think that the way the plant’s designed … the material-handling and automation equipment lends itself to a safer laundry.”
Watch for more on HandCraft’s new High Point laundry in November’s Textile Services magazine. Attendees at TRSA’s Virtual Healthcare Conference this Dec. 1-3 also will have access to a special downloadable edition of the November issue and our latest Healthcare Supplement published earlier this year. Visit www.trsa.org/healthcare for details on the conference.