Battling costs with quality
December 1st 2008 Premiere Products believes the way to save on costs and landfill is by producing
quality products, whether new or refurbished.Matt Burtinshaw talks scrubber dryers,
burnishing and back up to Gerardine Coyne
I have been told if you stick your head above the
parapet, sometimes it gets shot off," smiles Matt
Burtinshaw, head of purchasing & marketing at
Premiere Products."But I think the marketplace is
quite a settled one, so you have to look at different
avenues of attacking it which make a difference. Part
of the purchasing of FCM (in 2007) was to offer a very
wide range as FCM has always prided itself on trying
to be at the cutting edge of innovation, and
innovation can be competitive."
Burtinshaw says Premiere is focusing on
innovation. For example it is developing battery units
with its supply partner with built-in chargers and
working on parabolic squeegees, to take scrubberdrying
to areas below 10,000m2 at a competitive
price.The equipment is modular for easy transference
between floors or buildings, with a battery running
for about an hour. Burtinshaw says large retailers and
the logistics sector take the largest scrubber dryers, but the majority
of places that need to be cleaned are on the smaller side."It saves
time within the cleaning marketplace as most of the cost is labour, so
anything you can save in labour pays for the machine very swiftly."
Premiere is also pushing the refurbished side of the business for
price-sensitive contracts."Just because the economy downturns,
doesn't mean the need to clean at high level has been taken away. It
just means your budget's been halved," argues Burtinshaw."I believe
over the next six to nine months the refurbished range will be
become a bigger player in the market. Because people say I need a
machine but I can't afford 5000, what have you got for 2500? I
need it to be 34" because I'm cleaning a warehouse or a retail chain.
And on the smaller side of it, again it's all about saving money. If you
put mechanised scrubbing into a site which previously was being
mopped and you save 20mins a day, add that up over your contract
of a month, and the savings that one machine costing at about 1000
makes, means it pays for itself quite quickly."
Lean green machines
Another positive aspect of refurbishment is sustainability.With the
reintroduction of old machinery into the marketplace comes a
reduction in landfill."So it has got a green message," says Burtinshaw.
"That's something as a company as a chemical manufacturer
we're quite keen on, because you have to adhere at much higher
levels than other industries as a chemical manufacturer for your
green policies, and we carry that through into our machine
manufacturing.All our rotaries are built and manufactured onsite in
the UK, some of our scrubber dryers come from Europe, but we try
and keep it down as much as possible, bringing across large loads."
Refurbished machines are done up for both hire and refurb-to-sell
avenues."If people can't afford to buy even a refurbished machine,
they may be willing to take it out on hire for two/three or even 12
months at a no output cost to keep standards up," says Burtinshaw.
As a company Premiere prides itself on quality."We sell good
quality equipment because that's the reputation that Premiere was
built on," says Burtinshaw."But it's the service and the backup, and
the size of the organisation we have 30 engineers
around the UK providing national coverage, and 40
sales executives to help with back up training and
support that makes us different.We can do large
startups with our own trained staff, and because we
have a BICSc accredited training centre, our staff on
both sides are trained to the highest level. It's really the
backup you get behind the machine."
And the most common problem with scrubber
dryers? Burtinshaw laughs,"The people who use them.
(Burtinshaw comes from a contract cleaning
background). Joking aside, cleaning has a transient
workpool you rarely get the same cleaner staying on
one contact for 12 months, and every contract cleaner
will tell you that people are trained before they use
equipment but every now and then people don't use it
in the way that they should and they break it.And
sometimes due to budget you get machines that aren't
suitable for cleaning a particular area but they use it anyway.Again, in
my view it comes back to training and support."
Moving on to burnishers, Burtinshaw says build quality is key.
"There's a lot of cheap machinery which rotates a pad around the
floor and you can say you're burnishing. But if you put a good
machine by the side of it, which has good spread of weight, the right
speed, the right motors and consistent rpm, then the quality of the
job will be ten times better." He argues that perceptions of burnishers
maybe to blame for a poor job."The problem within the burnishing
marketplace is its become not a consumable like vacuums but it's
not far off in many people's minds, because the prices have been
driven so low. Some of the major players in the UK are importing
them in bulk from China, whether that's the parts or the whole
machines made up.
"We are one of the UK manufacturers that still build on quality and
build to last. In the past twelve months our customers have spoken to
us and said 'we've tried cheap this, cheap that and it has let us down,
we want some quality'. I believe buying quality is the sustainable
choice because it will last five or ten years instead of 12 to 24 months
before becoming another landfill product."
But will high maintenance floors that need burnishing fall out of
favour if the economy weakens? Burtinshaw thinks not."Research has
shown that a shiny floor improves shopping. If people walk into a
clean shiny establishment, they're likely to spend more. So that's in
people's minds, no matter how much they cut back. It's not just clean,
it's perception of clean, and shine is a perception of a cleaner floor. If
two shops are side by side and one floor is shiny and other is dull and
the products are the same price, you know exactly which one you're
going to walk in to."
So in a large and competative marketplace, how does Premiere
want to be perceived? "In a nutshell,we want to be thought of as
quality with back up.We haven't jumped on the cheap and cheerful
'landfill products' route," says Burtinshaw."We maintain that you buy
the machine for the longevity of that machine to do a high quality
job, and we'll offer the back-up to
make sure it actually does that."
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