CLEVELAND — Operating any laundry in today’s environment can often feel as though one is traversing along the edge of a cliff. The only question is whether your operation is 1 inch from the edge or 1 foot from the drop, and that measurement can change in seconds.
With experience and attentiveness, we become less distracted by the threats and more focused on ensuring how we will obviate and therefore avoid these threats. Inevitably, the day comes when we teeter on the brink, and most of us have war stories about those times.
The idea of comprehensive contingency plans that are fully developed and well-vetted will help, but the prospect of real redundancy is a fantastic boon to this kind of scenario and reduces sleepless nights dramatically. This is fiscally a pipe dream for nearly everyone, but what can we do to substitute for that dream?
Most laundry operators have area contacts that may be able to lend a hand, and mutual assistance is common, even among competitors (during these events) in our industry. In healthcare, regulatory bodies require written handshakes to validate these discussions.
When creating memorandum of understanding (MOU), be sure to include pricing and requirements of your customers like delivery times and access procedures.
Typically, the problem of scale is the major culprit in ensuring workable alternative strategies. The larger the operation, the less likely there are others near at hand that have the horsepower to assume the load … especially at the drop of a hat. Dividing the load among multiple alternative pathways is a reasonable compromise, but the exponential complexity of managing this leads to innumerable opportunities for failure.
Fully planning this kind of operation is going to be critical to having a measure of success in this type of endeavor.
Time and distance are the first factors that must be accounted for when setting your strategy and then your tactics to accomplish the goals, which need to be comprehensive and detailed.
The alternate processors you have made agreements with must be made aware of the level of expectation your clients require, and it must be understood and agreed to as part of the planning process. Quality standards, finish, packing and delivery/pickup schedules are must-haves. There simply will not be time to educate during the crisis.
Linen suppliers should be made aware of the possibility that linen may need to be delivered to the alternates with little or no warning.
If your facility is rendered inoperable, it is likely that linen at the plant will be unavailable, so replacement linens will be needed immediately to fill client needs. Things like docks, liftgates and forklifts will need to be understood beforehand for everyone to be effective and efficient during this period.
The transportation logistics alone can be daunting, and ensuring the correct distribution of work across your options is absolutely not something to barnstorm if at all possible.
In larger markets, it is easier to make agreements to take an easily divisible fraction of the work and assign it to a specific alternate. Do this for all your volume while keeping a spare or two for secondary contingency.
In smaller markets and more rural areas, this becomes more challenging, and a wider area of travel and elapsed time quickly become huge factors. Envision a different alternate processing option for each one of the major clients and a couple of different options for the small account groups. The smaller the slice of the work assigned to the alternates, the more likely that the alternate can effectively perform the work, which reduces the potentially negative impact on the client.
The nuts and bolts of redundancy, resiliency and contingency planning are not mysterious to managers who have seen the edge of the cliff. The goal is to survive these events and for your clients to be unburdened with a share of the difficulty during the event. The importance of creating complete and detailed processes that can be followed by others is what makes the difference during these events.
These are some of the pitfalls when building robust redundancy plans:
The One-Man Show. It is easy to place all the decision tree items in the hands of the “boss,” and it is a common enough practice. What happens when communication is not immediate, and a situation is emergent?
Picture the leader responsible for deciding actions being on a cruise in the Caribbean for their 20th wedding anniversary or having minor surgery. Prompt and decisive action does not happen, and the problems are compounded by the lack of a timely or cohesive response by those on hand.
Placing the authority to make these decisions perhaps should rest with the senior person available to address the situation … and they must know that they are allowed to act and what to do first, second, third and so on.
Incomplete or undefined actions. Who do we have for a backup, and how do we initiate the plan?
If the information on who and how is located on a shelf in a dusty binder with the management team not aware of the location of, or immediate access to, the plans, then, once again, critical response time is lost.
Briefing all leaders of the contingency to act independently when faced with emergent and adverse conditions is an imperative in redundancy plans. Training all the leaders to enact redundancy plans is both prudent and necessary.
Consider a mock exercise with your leadership team on a periodic basis to familiarize everyone with contingency processes and minimize fear of action during the event. Once again, an accessible and detailed playbook, arranged by condition to reference, may make the difference between a disruption and a disaster for your clients.
Double trouble. Compounding issues can derail even a solid redundancy plan, but it can happen, and often the linkage is not a stretch.
A flood outside that enters the plant is an event, but if your fleet vehicles are parked at recessed docks, they are also likely to be compromised. If the roof of your facility is partly blown away, it is not a long reach to find the roof has landed on the trucks in your docks. No electrical power means no steam, no automatic cart-washing, no delivery ticket-printing, no electronic time clocks, and a host of other issues aside from the core activity of linen processing.
Assessing the impact of reasonable service interruptions and fully defining actions to be taken in a specific order can have influence in these circumstances, and knowing where and who will be initiating the plan is not a fill-in-the-blank operation if it is intended to be a realistic plan.
Every facility is unique in the makeup of its business; every leadership team is one of a kind.
Spending some time now determining the marching order and flowchart steps will be invaluable in the event it is needed.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].
