National Clothesline

Perhaps you have just begun to compile records for your accountant. When we do this, it is often overwhelming. How can we save money on anything in 2005?

Our supply costs spin out of control — literally — because we are at the mercy of the suppliers’ prices. Sure, we can bargain down on items that are cheaper in the catalog, but all in all, it’s out of our control.

Shirt hangers, for example, cost 300 percent more than they did when I sold my plant nearly six years ago. You can’t help that. The best that you can do to keep supply cost down is to buy a truck load of hangers and store them and to buy larger quantities of other goods so as to get the maximum price break. You pay more up front and realize savings down the road.

Utilities? You probably insulated your steam pipes years ago. You had to make an investment in materials and manpower to do the work. You can buy a more efficient water heater or boiler. Spend some money and you’ll get back some sort of return. Sometimes it’s a slow return, but you believe that it’s there.

Labor? Well you probably think that your labor is as low as it can be and I’d probably disagree, but either way, in order to reduce your labor cost you may have to invest in different, improved equipment or adopt a new way of doing things. Still, in the final analysis, you will need to invest some money up front in order to get a perpetual payback.

As you peruse your list of expenses, you may come up with ways to trim back on certain line items. You may be right, but I’m guessing that when you get to the “Equipment Maintenance” line, you feel that there is nothing that you can do. In fact, you may pay it without a second thought, knowing full well that repairing your equipment is far better and far cheaper than buying something new.

This may be completely true, but I think that there is a way to pay less and get more. We are all familiar with preventive maintenance and most of us believe that we live by it. I’m not so sure. We may have a guy who comes in on Saturdays and tops off the automatic oilers and dusts the equipment, but that isn’t enough. The thought is right but the agenda is incomplete.

The biggest problem with the whole concept of preventative maintenance is that most maintenance staffs are under the gun to get a ton of stuff done. They are generally unable to get ahead.

Things break down all the time and the thought of ever breaking that cycle is truly a dream. You want to be preventing breakdowns rather than continually fighting fires. This seems like a dream, but the great news is that the PM part takes much less time than fixing the catastrophes. Once you get the tide turning the other way you will save money that you never thought possible. It could be tens of thousands of dollars.

How do you prevent big problems with your shirt equipment? Take care of the little ones.

Wise words, but how do you get going in that direction? This isn’t easy. You will need to get an objective list of the things that need to get done, but that never make it to the top of the priority list. Nagging little broken switches, loose clamps and other band-aids that may have put out a fire at one time, but have continued to fester and simmer.

Your maintenance man is probably not a good choice for this. He isn’t going too see all of the little things that are wrong. You probably aren’t either. Pressers and similar people may not have enough technical know-how to know what is broken.

If you can’t get a friendly competitor to come in and check out your equipment, try getting two or three people to make an independent list. In that case, you or your maintenance man can make a list. You and he are much more likely to scrutinize every machine if you know that someone else will be looking as well.

Now have your maintenance guy repair at least one item per week. Or per day. It may be a slow process, but at least you’ll be moving forward.

The tricky thing about PM is that the payback is intangible. If you jingle up a bunch of money to stockpile hangers, for example, you will know that you’ve beaten the system every time you hear the new price on hangers.

If you jingle up for parts that you think that you need, the feeling isn’t so reassuring. You’ll never experience the catastrophe that you’re trying to prevent. Or when it does happen, you won’t know that it would have happened twice were it not for your maintenance schedule. Or when you have an ugly breakdown, you won’t think about how much worse it would have been had you not done this and that.

Those are tough things to deal with. If we are taking our maintenance staff into overtime to do something that “can wait,” we want to feel like there is a payback. There is. It’s just hard to measure. But consider these examples:

The vacuum hoses need to be inspected for rub marks, fraying or other signs of wear. If, suddenly, they split, you will call the manufacturer and have the hoses FedEx’d to you immediately.

You will incur at least a couple of extra costs. First, the overnight shipping. You will reason that overnight shipping is cheaper than extra down time, and you’re right. Extra labor to touch-up shirts while the vacuum isn’t working. (I admit that I am assuming that you will actually do the touch-up rather than tell your customers that “hey, the machine’s broke.”

Then, of course, the down time to diagnose and repair the problem. If you are in an argumentative mood, you may say that all that is okay with you. You would rather spend extra money for shipping and touch-up labor and down-time costs than have “money tied up on the shelves for a part that you don’t need.”

Well, touché! I doubt that an accountant would prove you right, however.

If every trap in the plant was constantly being monitored to assure that it was functioning properly, the amount that you’d surely save on increased energy costs and diminished quality is incalculable.

I admit that spending a few bucks per trap doesn’t mean anything if they aren’t constantly checked to verify that they are working properly.

Have you ever considered a checklist? Have a different person walk around the plant every week to check every trap.

You will never see a check in the mail, but that action will save you money. It may not save you money on your maintenance bill, though, so perhaps that idea is a wee bit off topic.

So how’s this for a whopper (in case I haven’t convinced you that you need better preventative maintenance):

Some manufacturers use an automatic oil and water separator on the incoming air line that has a green indicator on it to let you know that it is functioning. If the flag shows red, the filter element needs to be replaced immediately. This is a $35 part.

If this separator isn’t working correctly, oil and water will contaminate the compressed air. How bad can that be? The oil and water will corrode the rubber parts in the valves and cylinders. That’s probably why your shirt machine doesn’t work as well as it used to.

Each valve kit costs $35 and you’ll need about ten of them depending on the machine. But the cylinders need rebuilding, too, and those kits cost $60 each. We are already up to $500-$600.

But then you find that the water in the air has corroded the inside of the aluminum cylinders. They need to be replaced. They are several hundred dollars each. And this is all for just one of your machines. Those breakdowns that cost many hundreds of dollars are preventable, but you have to want to prevent them badly enough. It will take some effort and it will take some money, but it is effort and money that you will spend anyway.

With a preventative maintenance schedule — a rigid one — the expenditures of time, effort and resources will be on your terms.

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got.”