Episode 44 – Increasing Your Route Efficiency

Welcome to the TRSA podcast. Providing interviews and insights from the linen, uniform, and facility services industry. Most Americans might not realize it, but they benefit at least once per week from the cleanliness and safety of laundered, reusable linens, uniforms, towels, mats, and other products provided by various businesses and organizations. TRSA represents the companies that supply, launder, and maintain linens and uniforms. And in this podcast, we will bring the thought leaders of the industry to you.

Welcome to another episode of the Linen Uniform and Facility Services podcast, interviews and insights by TRSA. I’m your host, Jason Risley. On today’s episode of the show, we’ll learn the steps that TRSA operator member Hub Services took to improve its route efficiency. Jeff Blum, route supervisor, and Matthew Calipi, service manager at Hubs, join us to share more about the company’s transformation on the route. One of the big reasons that Hitch was asked to present today was because of the recent improvements that we have made to improve our route efficiency.

Probably one of the newest and most notable was updating our route accounting software to the ABS or Absolute system. Previously, we had used a, a pretty traditional archaic system where our route reps would do everything by paperwork, filling out forms, handing them into customer service, customer service making modifications in the system, handing back the paperwork for the RSRs to double check. And then hopefully through all those touches, everything would turn out the way that was intended. With the new system, the RSRs have their own handhelds. They’re able to make adjustments in real time, and that process then transitions over to a web client check-in for the route supervisors to see any changes that were made, to verify the changes, and if they needed to they can modify and correct them before they pass through.

Once our route supervisors verify the changes then they pass through and they’re done. Route reps can see them in real time. So this has been a very empowering process for our route reps. It’s reduced a lot of the time that’s spent on the back end and has increased accuracy across the board. So I’ll let Matt hear talk.

Among those improvements also included are a lot of ways in which our communication, between different individuals in the organization, and, of course, our communication with our customer has been improved, especially around the traceability of our Garmin scans, in a timely way. So everyone from our RSRs to our management staff to customer service are seeing real time updates on where the garments are and the counts on any given route day, any given route. In addition to that, because we’re able to now track arrival and departure times, as well as geotag, those entry points to our customers. We found that there’s a lot easier rerouting and optimized navigation, especially for our support staff, when they’re covering for RSRs when they’re on vacation, as well as just giving us a lot easier overlay of data points when it comes time to decide if we need to move routing and, shift customers from one place to another. And lastly, in our communication with our customers, we’ve had recently some people that, reach out and are asking about our delivery on a certain day, a certain time.

Maybe it’s a customer that we have a key to, so we don’t actually see somebody on-site. We’re able to go back in history on that day and verify, that our staff were there, in fact, at 10:15 AM on Monday, whatever the date might be. So that’s another specific example of how, this software has enabled us to communicate more clearly and specifically with our customers and have everybody in our organization on the same page. One way that’s not necessarily technology related, but has improved our efficiency greatly, is that our product mix, being very heavily en masse in the location that I work in, we had guys that really appreciated using the 2 wheel hand truck for a very long time. And with the increased product mix that we were moving to, from mats to uniforms and other linens, we decided to go to a hard sided basket.

And this has given our RSRs the ability to stage product a lot more efficiently, carry more in, having less thrown over the shoulder. So quality of life enhancement big time, as well as just cost savings, and that we’re using a product that’s hardy, that we aren’t going to have to replace, as quickly as our previous style of material handling. And one of the other big points that we’ve improved with at Hitash that’s, helped with not just the quality for us, but to help with the customers as well is switching over entirely to a shelf stock program. So customers now have, whatever the amount that they agreed to on the shelf, that’s the amount that they’re gonna have when RSR finishes servicing the the account. And we just bill on that dollar amount.

So that way we can have consistent billing for our customers. It makes things a lot easier to understand on their end, and it makes it much easier for us to manage and maintain on the back end. If you want to hear more tips from industry experts on how to improve your efficiency on the route, tune in to TRSA’s Improving Route Stop Performance Webinar series brought to you by TRSA’s Industrial Uniform and Workwear Committee. You can view the recordings for all three parts of the series in TRSA’s on demand learning center, which houses more than 150 webinars, training videos, and other e learning courses. Thanks again for tuning in to the podcast, and please subscribe, rate, and review our show on Apple Itunes, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher.